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Royal Albert Dock and London City Airport

After last Sunday’s diversion, I am back in the Royal Docks, this time exploring the second of the three individual docks that make up the overall “Royals” dock complex – the Royal Albert Dock.

The following map shows the Royal Albert Dock (the top of the two docks), and the red dotted line shows the walk I am covering in today’s post, with some of the key buildings circled. I am starting at the red oval to the left of the map. There is so much to find around this part of east London, that it will take a couple of posts to cover  (© OpenStreetMap contributors).

I also have an error to own up to. In my original post on the history of the Royal docks, I included a number of photos that my father had taken, describing them all as being of the Royal Victoria Dock. From some comments and emails received (thanks for all the comments, they are all read and appreciated), from people who had worked in, and known the area well, the photo showing ships lining the sides of a dock was in fact the Royal Albert Dock:

Whilst all the other photos had identifiable features, and were of the Royal Victoria Dock, my father must have started his walk around the Royal Victoria Dock at the eastern end of the dock, where it joined the Royal Albert, and where there was a good view along the Royal Albert, so the above photo is of the Royal Albert Dock, and is where I am walking in today’s post.

I started the walk at the appropriately named Royal Albert Station on the Docklands Light Railway:

One of the few surviving buildings from when the docks were operational is located right next to the DLR station, this is the Compressor House (light blue oval in the map):

The Compressor House dates from 1914 and was originally a warehouse providing cold storage for cargo shipped via the Royal Docks:

The Compressor House featured in a document released by the Mayor of London back in May 2024. The document covers the “leasehold disposal of Compressor House, for 10 years, to Really Local Group to deliver a project that addresses priorities of good growth, levelling up and Royal Docks placemaking; and provides best value for the GLA Land and Property Limited commercial asset.”

Apparently the building retains many original internal features such as hoists, rails and winching machinery. Plans for the building include a café, rooms for hire, including for exhibitions and performances, and a learning / meeting room.

I love the terms used in documents talking about the benefits of a project, as the Mayor of London document talks about linking the surrounding communities with the Royal Docks, through “in this case through the lens of digital inclusion”. I have no idea what this means.

It would be really good to make publicly accessible use of the building – providing the original features are retained, along with the story of how the building was once part of the Royal Docks success.

Arms of the Port of London Authority and the date of 1914 displayed above the door.

From the Royal Albert DLR station, and the Compressor House, it was a very short walk to the side of the Royal Albert Dock:

There is a wide walkway along the northern edge of the dock, with some recent developments along the side, but what impresses is the enormous expanse of water. The above view is looking east, and the view below is looking to the west, where the bridge can be seen that marks the point where the Royal Albert meets the Royal Victoria Dock:

Whilst there has been less development along this side of the Royal Albert Dock, along the south of the dock, where there is a strip of land between the Royal Albert and King George V dock, there is the result of one of the first major infrastructure projects around the Royal Docks, that was, and continues to be an issue for many local residents, and which made the Royal Docks a significant transport hub for London. This is London City Airport, where from the north side of the dock, you can watch planes landing and taking off, where there were once warehouses:

View across to the terminal buildings at London City Airport:

The idea for an airport in the docklands came from the London Docklands Development Corporation in the early 1980s. The concept was for an airport that would service the business centres of the City of London, and the proposed development centered on Canary Wharf in the Isle of Dogs.

The airport would offer swift access from these centres of business, with minimal waiting time at the airport. Almost a “turn up and fly” approach, rather than the longer travel out to airports such as Heathrow and Gatwick, with the lengthier times for check-in, security etc. as well as often delayed take-offs and landings.

The airport was built by the civil engineering and construction company, Mowlem, between 1986 and 1987.

Incidentally, one of the best books I have on the construction and engineering of the London Docks is “London Docks 1800 – 1980 by Ivan Greeves (1980)”. (I will give a long list of the books and sources I have used in the final post on the Royal Docks).

Ivan Greeves was a fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a Director of John Mowlem, and Mowlem had been involved with many of the civil engineering projects around the London Docks. Greeves’ book is a wonderful detailed civil engineering history of the London Docks.

There were many publications by both the LDDC and other publishers, as the development of the docklands got underway. I collected as many as I could, and one was the magazine “Vistas”, published by the London Docklands Publishing Consortium, and in issue 2. Spring 1987, the first two airlines that would use London City Airport, which would open later in the year were featured:

The first two airlines were Brymon Airways and Eurocity Express, and an article in Vistas explains the airlines plans, and the type of service they intended to operate from the new docklands airport.

There is also a photo showing London City Airport under construction, when it occupied just the land between the Royal Albert and George V docks:

The article continues, with both airlines explaining the benefits of flying from London City Airport, with Brymon fully focused on the business traveler, and Eurocity Express also focused on the business traveler, but also expecting a share of leisure travelers:

It was a Brymon flight that had helped prove that planes could take off and land from short landing strips in the docklands, when in 1982 a Brymon Dash 7 aircraft landed at Heron Quays in Canary Wharf.

Eurocity Express changed name to London City Airways in 1988 to more closely align the identity of the airline with London City Airport, but would suffer financial collapse two years later in 1990.

In the late 1980s I worked for a company that was split between London and Amsterdam and did use London City Airport a number of times. It was a really fast airport to get through, whether arriving or departing, and the best bit was always coming into land, with the steep approach, and good views of the surrounding docklands.

I did take my camera a number of times, but cannot find the negatives. Hopefully one day.

Old and new industries / business around the Royal Docks – planes at London City Airport, with the Tate and Lyle factory in the background:

After opening, the airlines operating from London City Airport used propeller driven airplanes such as the Dash 7. These carried relatively few passengers when compared to larger jet aircraft, however they were more than capable of landing and taking of from a short runway.

The airport served business centres close to the UK, such as Amsterdam and Paris, and in the following years the destinations served, as well as the number of passengers grew considerably (including New York for a short time).

An extension to the airport opened in 1992. Access to the airport improved in 2005 when a DLR station was opened at the airport, and in 2008, additional aircraft parking space was opened on an extension to the airport built on piles over part of the King George V dock.

Jet aircraft started to use the airport in the early 1990s, and today jet aircraft run the majority of services, with a small number of propeller driven aircraft still operating.

In the first full year of operation, 133,000 passengers passed through London City Airport. In August of this year, the Government approved the expansion of the airport to increase capacity from 6.5 million to 9 million, with more weekend and early morning flights.

Flight destinations and the target traveler have also moved on from the initial business market, and when I had a look in the terminal building there seemed to be just as many people, if not more, going away for leisure, including families, than business.

I am writing this on a Friday evening, and I had a look at the first flight on Saturday morning which is a British Airways flight to Ibiza – definitely not one of the original target markets.

There is not much going on along the north bank of the Royal Albert Dock, and whilst I was walking, on a summer’s weekday morning, there were very few people around., so in this quiet place, it is strange to hear the sound of a jet aircraft taking off, or the quitter sound of a landing, at regular intervals:

There is a certain symetry between the airport and the old docks. The docks transported cargo all over the world and the airport is now flying people.

The north bank of the dock is really quiet, as this view along the walkway demonstrates:

And with it being such a peaceful environment, it is hard to imagine just how busy the Royal Albert Dock was, and what a sight it must have been, with so many ships coming and going, and vast amounts of cargo being shifted between warehouses, transit sheds, quayside, lighters and ships, as the following photo of the dock demonstrates:

The warehouses that ran alongside the length of the dock were not meant for long term storage, most were transit sheds as this was their main purpose, to temporarily hold cargo as it transited from ship to destination, or from source to ship.

The following photo shows a typical transit shed at the Royal Albert Dock:

And an innovation across the Royal Docks was the use of the railway as a means of transport. The docks were threaded through with rail lines allowing the movement of goods within the docks, and out onto the wider mainline rail networks, as the following photo of a cold store, along with overhead conveyors between buildings, shows:

Continuing the walk along the Royal Albert Dock, and I have reached a series of office blocks:

I have no idea who thinks of the slogans that often try to attract people or companies to new properties, “Regenerative Audacious Disruptive” and “Where Paradigms Shift” – totally meaningless – although I suppose that if a company moved their office to one of these blocks, with so few facilities or other businesses around, it would genuinely be “disruptive”:

Although they do have a good view along the dock, and across to the towers on the Isle of Dogs:

All these office blocks appear to be unoccupied, and they are a testament to an over hyped scheme that was entirely dependent on foreign investment and foreign businesses.

A headline in the Guardian on the 30th of May, 2013 read “Chinese to develop slice of British imperial past: Royal Albert Dock due to be Asian business park by 2023: Transformation of London site could bring 20,000 jobs”.

The article below the above headline reported that the Chinese developer Advanced Business Park had signed a £1 billion agreement with London Mayor Boris Johnson to develop a 35 acre site alongside the Royal Albert Dock with offices and shops, with the aim of attracting Asian businesses to set-up their European head quarters at the site, as well as British companies who do business in Asia.

At the signing of the agreement, Boris Johnson said that it would be “London’s third great business area” and that it “will restore jobs and growth to the Royal Docks, an area . . . that has been in more or less continuous decline for 50 or 60 years”.

The parts of the development that have been completed seem to have been mainly empty since completion, and the 20,000 jobs have not materialized.

In 2022 newspaper headlines reported that the “Royal Albert Dock a ghost town as developer goes bankrupt”. This was ABP Investment Ltd, the Beijing based original property developer.

In May, 2024 the Greater London Authority was looking for a new developer for the land alongside the northern edge of the Royal Albert Dock, as from the original 2013 agreement, only about 10% had been built, and this 10% was mainly empty office blocks.

The central street through the existing office blocks is called Mandarin Street, reflecting the Chinese heritage of the original developer and investment:

Leaving Mandarin Street, and the empty office blocks behind, I continue walking on past the empty land that should by now, based on the 2013 agreement, have seen 20,000 people working here:

Look left from my position when taking the above photo and there are some really good, original buildings from the time of the working docks, and this is the Dock Manager’s Offices (green oval in the map at the top of the post):

Grade II listed and built in 1883 by Vigers and Wagstaffe. The name of the building should explain what went on here – it was from where the Royal Docks were managed, where the dock records were kept and administered.

A second building, alongside the Dock Managers Office is the Central Buffet, also by Vigers and Wagstaffe, dating from 1883, and is also Grade II listed.

The Central Buffest appears to have been a café / restaurant for workers and for passengers traveling via the Royal Docks. It also appears to have been used as a pub, as this report from the 6th of December 1897 explains;

“BETTING AT THE ROYAL ALBERT DOCKS – At Stratford Police court on Saturday, Thomas Clarey, a lighterman, of 49, freemasons-road, Custom-house, was summoned on six information’s for using the Central Buffet, a public-house in the Royal Albert Docks, for the purpose of betting with other persons, and Henry James Morgan, the secretary of the London and India Docks Joint Committee, the holder of the licence of the Central Buffest, was summoned for permitting the place to be used for the purposes of betting.”

A “barmaid” was also called to give evidence, so the Central Buffet was certainly also working as a pub.

The Dock Managers Office and the Central Buffet are remarkable buildings, and from their appearance they would be more expected in the suburbs, or as a country house, rather than in the industrial east London docks.

Winged figure with trumpet on top of the Central Buffet:

A look along the Royal Albert Dock, and there is still much of the dock behind me, and in the distance, out of sight in the photo below, is the Royal Victoria Dock. You really need to walk alongside the Royal Docks to fully appreciate the sheer scale of these manmade temples to London’s trade:

Vessels berthed at the Royal Albert Dock:

More shipping in the Royal Albert Dock:

New Quays added to the Royal Albert Dock in the 1930s:

The following photo shows how cargo could be loaded to and from lighters as well as the quayside. The Royal Albert Dock was known as a dock where goods of all sorts could fine the appropriate facilities for unloading, storage and distribution:

All very different today as I walk along a mainly silent quayside, with just the occasional take off or landing on the other side of the water to disturb the peace.

London City Airport is on the south side of the Royal Albert Dock, however there was a second, short term airstrip on the north side of the dock.

In 2007, the Red Bull air racing event took place in London, and the long open space alongside the north of the dock proved ideal for the pits area and runway for the event.

If I remember correctly, the Red Bull race was also held in docklands in the following year, 2008, and these events had quite an impact on the London City Airport, as flights from the airport had to be suspended whilst Red Bull racing was underway.

Peer over a fence as you walk along the north side of the Royal Albert Dock, and parts of the overgrown runway can still be seen:

The RB in the runway designation of RB 28 stands for Red Bull. There is a photo of the runway in as new condition, and when in use for Red Bull Racing on the Abandoned Forgotten & Little Known Airfields in Europe website, which can be found by clicking here.

Further along the Royal Albert Dock, there are some recent buildings which have brought activity to the area, although as I was there during August, they were again very quiet.

These are educational establishments, and first is the London Design and Engineering UTC (University Technical College):

A UTC is a government funded school that offers 14 to 19 year olds a more focused technical and scientific educational, taught in a different way to a normal school.

The next building is the University of East London:

The area around these buildings should be much busier in school term time, but during August they just added to the sense that the northern section of the Royal Albert Dock needs a considered development plan to bring in more life, and benefits for the local community just outside of the dock, not just yet another area flooded with identikit apartment blocks.

Next to the university buildings there is the student accommodation, which includes several rather different, round blocks:

They are described as “having a nautical theme in homage to the shipping heritage of the area”:

They certainly have a good view, looking out on the dock, and with views of planes arriving and departing at the airport on the opposite side of the dock:

The Royal Albert Dock was opened on the 24th of June, 1880, and cost £2,100,000 to construct – a considerable sum of money at the time. I described the opening ceremony in my first post on the Royal Docks, here.

Although built not that long after the Royal Victoria Dock, the Royal Albert was needed to accommodate ships of larger size and deeper draught than the earlier Victoria Dock, as well as providing a significant amount of additional space for ships to dock, and the associated infrastructure for moving and storing cargo.

The Royal Albert Dock was 27 feet in depth (just 1.5 feet deeper than the Royal Victoria, but suffcient for the expected larger ships). The entrance from the Thames to the Royal Albert Dock was 550 feet in length and 80 feet wide.

The water area that the Royal Albert Dock occupied was 73 acres, compared to 66 acres for the Royal Victoria.

The Royal Albert Dock was the first London Dock to be lighted by electricity, and this helped the dock to be in use by both night as well as day.

Between the main dock area of the Royal Albert, and the locked entrance to the Thames was a basin. In the following photo, I am almost at the basin, and looking along the full length of the dock. A little way along the dock edge on the left, you can just see the entrance to the King George V Dock, which is to the south of the Royal Albert

Looking in the other direction at the basin, the area of water between the dock and the Thames:

The following map extract shows the eastern end of the Royal Albert Dock (upper length of water) with the basin connecting the dock to two entrances to the river:

Today, the area to the north of the basin has been redeveloped, and there are blocks of new apartment buildings to be seen. The area from the upper entrance to the river and down to the large entrance to the King George V dock is undeveloped, and is where we can see some of the old dock infrastructure, and get an impression of the size of the dock entrances.

Changes within the basin have added some routes across, including lifting bridges:

From this point, I took a very short detour to find another of the building that remain from when the docks were operational, the Galyons Royal Docks (purple oval in the map at the start of the post):

Originally the Gallions Hotel, it is Grade II* listed, and as with the Dock Managers Office and the Central Buffet, it was by George Vigers and T R Wagstaffe  and dates from the same period as it was built between 1881 and 1883:

The Civil & Military Gazette on November the 8th, 1893 carried an account of a visit to the Royal Docks, which included this description of the Gallions Hotel:

“At the Gallions Hotel you meet old salts and ships captains of all types; some, of the old-fashioned style, look as if they have just foregathered with their friends, Cap’en Cuttle and Bunsby, and shake their grizzled heads dolefully (as is the custom of grizzled heads all over the world) over the present degenerate age; they drink rum and hot water, with an enticing piece of lemon floating on the top out of fat glasses with a leg, called very appropriately ‘rummers’ and stir up the seductive beverage thoughtfully with a fat glass spoon.

Of a different stamp, and yet of the true British sailor breed are the smart young captains and mates who are standing each other whiskies and sodas (plenty of whisky and very little soda). The genial landlady knows them all, and has a greeting for each; they come and go at intervals, and in the meantime, have been round the world. It is a small journey now-a-days, this circumnavigation of the globe, and is thought nothing of at the Gallions. Many and curious are the tokens of affection and esteem brought home by these sailor men to their kind hostess; her parlour walls are simply covered with curios of every conceivable kind.”

The interior of the Gallion’s is interesting, and is perfectly described in the Historic England listing: “Notable interior with diagonal timber bracing of massive proportions to ground floor. Oak staircase with enriched balusters and newels. Main saloon contains huge timber bar and original fittings.”

The exterior is equally interesting, with a “roughcast first floor with plaster frieze by Edward Roscoe Mullins”:

According to the excellent book “Docklands – An illustrated historical survey of life and work in east London” (North East London Polytechnic – 1986), the Gallions Hotel was for the “use of liner passengers embarking at the adjacent jetty. A subway used to connect with the Royal Albert Dock Basin”. I have also read that the subway was more a covered walkway between hotel and boarding point for liners.

Whilst the Gallions Hotel (or Galyons using today’s spelling) is still a pub / restaurant today, it is now serving a very different clientele. Not a liner passenger or “old salts and ships captains” in sight.

There is another building nearby which is also still serving the same purpose. This is the Royal Docks Impounding Station (yellow oval in the map at the start of the post):

The purpose of an impounding station is to maintain the water level in the enclosed area of the docks.

The docks gradually loose water through evaporation, seepage through the walls of the dock, and through the lock gates, although this is less of a problem as the lock gates are infrequently opened these days.

To replace lost water, the impounding station pumps water into the docks from the Thames, and on the day of my visit, possibly difficult to see in the following photo, the impounding station was active, and water was upwelling in the area in front of the four pipes which route the water into the basin. The water was very mud coloured compared to the rest of the dock:

The impounding station was built in 1912 and was originally equipped with three steam driven pumps. These were replaced by four electrically powered pumps in 1954. 

There is a water intake in the Thames at Gallions Reach, and a 4m by 5.5m intake culvert connects to the impounding station, below which is a large wet well, where water from the intake is then pumped into the dock.

To put the operation of the building into perspective, each of the four pipes leading from the building into the dock are 70 inches in diameter, and through these, each pump and pipe carries 7150 litres of Thames water a second into the dock, and as an Olympic swimming pool is the usual measure when water is concerned, when all four pumps are working they would fill one of these swimming pools in one and a half minutes.

Whilst I have not seen inside the Royal Docks Impounding Station, a few years ago I did visit the impounding station at West India Dock, which you can read about in this post.

Arms of the Port of London Authority and date of construction on the impounding station:

The rear of the impounding station, also showing the new apartment buildings that have been recently built around the west end of the Royal Albert Dock:

By the end of the 19th century, the Royal Victoria and Royal Albert Docks were very busy places. Their colossal length could handle very many large ships at the same time. Cold stores, general warehouses and transit sheds were integrated with a rail network that ran within and around the docks, interconnecting the docks and with the wider national rail network.

Ships were getting larger and faster, and refrigerated shipping brought new opportunities to bring cargo into the country, however the success of the docks was also seen as a threat to many traditional businesses within the UK, as the following extract also from the Civil & Military Gazette on November the 8th, 1893 explains:

“The ships of this line (at any rate those employed in the frozen meat trade), go out with general cargoes round the Cape of Good Hope, and return around Cape Horn; they are away altogether about five months each trip. In addition to the mutton and lamb, a great trade is gradually springing up in butter and cheese, and many tons of these commodities are now imported into England. It seems a poor look out for the wretched British farmer, and something will have to be done for him before long, or the agriculturist in Britain will become as extinct as the dodo; he is undersold at all points, and cannot make a living from the soil.”

As has always been the case, the ability to import large quantities of a product frequently causes a conflict with internal producers which often cannot compete.

There is so very much to see around the Royal Docks, and in next week’s post, I will be walking through the more derelict part of the area, where the entrances between the Thames and the dock are located, walking across a large locked entrance, and then into North Woolwich and Silvertown.

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The Mermaid Theatre – Puddle Dock

If you have been on my Puddle Dock walk, you will recognise this location, the old Mermaid Theatre alongside Puddle Dock.

Although I have written about Puddle Dock before (there is a link at the end of the post), I have not covered the Mermaid Theatre, so time to remedy that omission in today’s post.

The Mermaid Theatre is the brick building in the centre of the following photo:

Upper Thames Street is the road in the foreground. This was constructed on land reclaimed from the Thames foreshore as part of the late 1970s / early 1980s redevelopment of the whole area in the photo.

The street Puddle Dock, which occupies the site of the original Puddle Dock is the street to the left of the photo.

Another view of the Mermaid Theatre. This is not the original theatre, it was part of the redevelopment of the area when the surrounding office blocks were built, along with Upper Thames Street:

The following photo shows the original Mermaid Theatre building, the smaller building in the centre of the photo, alongside the edge of the Thames:

In the above photo, all the land in front of the theatre would be reclaimed to allow the move of Upper Thames Street to a new dual carriageway. New office blocks were built around the theatre and Puddle Dock, which can be seen to the left of the theatre, was filled in and the street with the same name constructed.

The story of the theatre, how it came to occupy this bomb damaged site, and its transformation to the place we see today, is the subject of today’s post.

The Mermaid Theatre was the dream of Bernard Miles and his wife, Josephine Wilson.

Bernard Miles was born in Uxbridge to a father who was a market gardener and mother who was a cook.

He went to school in Uxbridge and then Pembroke College, Oxford, and after university he took a job as a teacher, but he would not stay for long in this profession.

His first acting role was as the second messenger in a revival of Richard III, after which he joined a number of repertory companies taking on roles from a carpenter to an actor. He had London stage roles in the late 1930s and early 1940s, including touring with the Old Vic.

He also had a number of film roles starting with the 1932 film, Channel Crossing, and the films that followed included In Which We Serve (1942) and Great Expectations (1946), and he continued to have film roles through to his final film in 1988, The Lady and the Highwayman.

He also appeared on TV, with one of his best known roles as Long John Silver in a TV series and later TV film of Treasure Island. He would also play the role of Long John Silver when Treasure Island was put on at the Mermaid Theatre.

He perhaps overplayed the role of a pirate when he “kidnapped” the Governor of the Bank of England on a short river journey on the Thames, when he “relived” the Governor of a cheque for £25 in support of the Mermaid, and then used the event to claim that the Mermaid Theatre was supported by the Bank of England.

It was down to Bernard Miles enthusiasm for the Mermaid Theatre, his ability to fund raise, and his sheer hard work throughout the whole process, that took the Mermaid Theatre from idea through to a working theatre, opening in 1959.

To explore the story of the Mermaid Theatre, I will use the Press Information document issued for the official opening of the theatre at 6p.m. on Thursday the 28th of May, 1959:

The press pack starts with the background to the Mermaid:

“‘See the players well bestowed’, says Hamlet, and the City has obeyed his solemn injunction by helping to bring to fruition a dream born on Acacia Road, St. john’s Wood, nine years ago.

In the dream Bernard Miles and his wife, Josephine Wilson saw one of the most exciting small theatres in Europe rising against the blitzed warehouses of the City’s riverside. They saw a new and vital centre of entertainment thriving in the great business hub of the Commonwealth.

In that summer of 1951, they had built a small theatre in their back garden. Its stage and fittings had been planned by two brilliant young designers, Michael Stringer and Walter Hodges, and early in September the Mermaid Theatre opened with Kirsten Flagsted singing twenty-six performances of Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’. Her salary for the season was a bottle of stout a day.

This first season was such a success that it was decided to have another one the following year. This time Bernard and Josephine Miles had no idea that before long they would be building a real bricks and mortar theatre in E.C.4. But during the second Mermaid season, a good friend of the Miles’ brought the Lord Mayor, Sir Leslie Boyce, to see the production of Macbeth. It was the Lord Mayor who suggested that the Mermaid be brought to the City for Coronation Year.

So it came about that between May and August 1953, the Mermaid Company played 13 weeks on the Piazza of the historic Royal Exchange in the very heart of a City, theatre less for nearly 300 years. And 70,000 people paid to see the four productions. This solid support led the Miles’s to believe that there was a very real demand for drama in the City.

From this point the ball began to roll towards Puddle Dock. It was argued that if they could persuade the City Corporation to lease them a bombed site for a token rent and then build the theatre by public subscription, they could set it fee from rent and so bring the price down to a real pubic service and habit forming level.

And since the entire Box Office takings could then be spent on the productions, this freedom from rent would also act as a negative subsidy, giving vital artistic elbow room.

In 1956, the Corporation generously granted a lease of the Puddle Dock site, so rich in theatrical associations. Then began the task of raising the £62,000 required to build and equip the theatre.”

The Puddle Dock site provided by the City Corporation really was a bombed warehouse, as can be seen in the following photo with the warehouse that would become the Mermaid Theatre on the left, with Puddle Dock, with a moored barge, to the right of the warehouse:

Looking up what was Puddle Dock today, with the old Mermaid Theatre buildings on the right:

Following the provision of the warehouse site, the next step was to try and raise the money needed to build and equip the theatre. The press pack continues:

“COLLECTING THE MONEY: The Mermaid has been financed entirely by public subscription. By donations from banks, shipping companies, insurance companies, stockbrokers, the City livery companies, ordinary men and women all over the United Kingdom, indeed all over the world – in America, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Canada, Bermuda, Norway and Sweden.

The launching of the ‘buy-a-brick’ campaign in 1957 carried the Mermaid appeal across the world. Nearly 60,000 people have paid their half-crown for a brick in the venture.

There have been many delightful instances of individual generosity, many heart-touching stories of a very real and practical interest in the living theatre.

There is the old-age pensioner who write saying she would like to donate £5. Not having the ready cash, she asked to be allowed to subscribe on the ‘never-never’ – a down payment consisting of a savings book containing five shillings worth of 6d. savings stamps followed, and the installments are paid whenever she finds she has a bit to spare.

There is the 10-year-old boy in Hampstead who sent two half-crowns – ‘the profit I made on the pantomime Aladdin which I staged in my bedroom at Christmas’.

There is the man working next door to the theatre who every week for 2.5 years has clocked in to give his half-crown.

There is the school-girl who sent her 10 shilling birthday money – ‘It was given to me to spend on whatever I wanted most, and most of all I want four bricks in your theatre.”

There is the New Zealander who sent money for four ‘bricks’ on behalf of his ancestors who lived and worked in the City during the 18th and 19th centuries.

In addition to cash, covenants etc., the Mermaid has received many gifts of materials. Window frames, lavatory and wash basins, bricks, radiators, timber, electrical equipment, bars, tiles, piping, furniture, carpet. And the neighboring firms have helped by lending office accommodation and storage space; by donations of paper for our printing; by the free use of office machinery and facilities.”

A bit further up Puddle Dock and we can see where the entrance to the theatre dives under the 1980s office block:

Development of the Mermaid Theatre progressed as follows:

  • OCTOBER 1956; The Mermaid Theatre Trust is granted a lease of a bombed site in Puddle Dock. It is decided to incorporate the existing 4-ft thick walls in the design and simply bridge them with a concrete barrel roof. An appeal is launched for the £60,000 needed to complete and equip the building.
  • JULY 1957. Sufficient money has been collected for work to start on the site. An open-air concert is held on the site to mark the launching of the building programme. Artists include Amy Shuard, Denis Matthews, Harold Jackson, Larry Adler and Max Bygraves. Some 1000 people sat on park chairs on a bombed site open to the sky, and a mercifully fine evening gives a good send off to the Mermaid project.
  • SEPTEMBER 1957. The Lord Mayor of London launches a ‘buy-a-brick’ campaign to raise further funds for the theatre. He throws the first half-crown into a trunk on the steps of the historic Royal Exchange and appeals to the rank and file of City workers to support the venture. The two-week campaign brings some of the biggest names in show business into the streets and pubs of the City selling ‘bricks’. Over £3,000 is raised,
  • DECEMBER 1957. Work on the building advances. The site is a sea of scaffolding as work begins on the roof. Meanwhile the work of collecting money continues. Cheques roll in from the great mercantile exchanges, from banks and shipping companies, from stockbrokers, charitable trusts and insurance companies. From a host of firms and individuals.
  • MARCH 1958. The roof is on, A roof-warming party is held on the site. A torch lit at the stage door of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (London’s oldest theatre) is run through the streets to Puddle Dock by relays of the John Tiller Girls. on arrival at the Mermaid it is taken over by Norman Wisdom who casts it into the faggots beneath a 15-gallon cauldron of punch which is then served to the 1000 guests. Later, Norman joins the builders on the roof to drink a toast. Meanwhile, Sir Donald Wolfit, in a speech to the crowd, declares the roof ‘ well and truly no longer open’. The first stage of the building is complete.
  • JUNE 1958. Members of the Moscow Art Theatre Company pay a visit to the site. At tables under the new roof they sit down to a traditional English meal – roast beef and ale from the wood. During their visit, the director of the company, Mr. A. Golodovnikov, traces the M.A.T.’s seagull emblem in a block of cement as a permanent reminder of the visit. The Mermaid is made an honorary member of the M.A.T.
  • AUGUST 1958. the building is well advanced. the restaurant and dressing room area overlooking the river is nearing completion. Work has started on the seating ramp in the auditorium.
  • APRIL 1959. The auditorium and restaurant are complete. Work continues in the foyer.
  • MAY 1959. All is ready. A two year battle is won.

Before continuing with the story of the Mermaid Theatre, lets have a look at the location of the theatre, as the place today is very different compared to when the theatre opened in 1959.

The area around Puddle Dock was completely redeveloped in the late 1970s / early 1980s. New office blocks were built around the theatre, Puddle Dock was filled in, and replaced by the road that retains the name of the old dock, and the theatre was completely redeveloped.

This redevelopment resulted in the building that we see today, with a larger block to the south, overlooking the river, where the Mermaid Theatre restaurant and bar were located, the auditorium running back along the site of Puddle Dock, and the entrance to the theatre under the office block that spans Puddle Dock.

In the following photo, I am looking across the street Puddle Dock to the theatre entrance under the office block:

A close-up showing the glass windows of the entrance foyer, and a small passage running between the theatre and an office block to the left:

The late 1970s / early 1980s redevelopment of this whole area was significant, and included the reclamation of some of the Thames foreshore, and the rerouting of a historic London street.

The following map extract is from an early 1950s edition of the OS map. I have circled the word “ruin”, and this is the location of the ruined warehouse in the photo earlier in the post, and also the location of the Mermaid Theatre (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

You will see that Upper Thames Street runs to the north of the ruined warehouse, and further along to where it joins Queen Victoria Street.

As part of the 1970s / 1980s redevelopment, the foreshore in front of the 1959 build of the Mermaid Theatre was reclaimed, and Upper Thames Street rerouted to run along this reclaimed land as a dual carriageway (the route of the red line in the above map), part of the Lower and Upper Thames Street changes that provided a dual carriageway from north of the Tower of London to join with the Embankment.

And where Upper Thames Street once ran – a typical Victorian street lined by large warehouses and offices, today, in front of the Mermaid Theatre, there is a short passageway. Upper Thames Street once ran along here:

A wider view:

When the Mermaid Theatre opened in 1959, the main entrance to the theatre was onto the original alignment of Upper Thames Street, where the short passageway is in the above photo.

The following photo shows the main entrance to the theatre, with Upper Thames Street (as confirmed by the street sign on the theatre) in front of the building – now a short, dark passageway:

if you walked into the entrance shown above, through the foyer and then into the auditorium, then this would have been your view down to the stage, with the original warehouse walls to left and right, and the new concrete roof above:

The view of the auditorium in the above photo may look rather basic, however at opening, the Mermaid Theatre had:

  • 500 theatre seats on a single sharply-raked tier
  • A stage of 48 feet wide by 28 feet deep
  • An extensive stage lighting system
  • The Mermaid was the first theatre in the country to have a stereophonic sound system, a donation from the Decca Record Company
  • Restaurant and snack bars
  • Eight dressing rooms with total accommodation for 50 to 60 actors. The dressing rooms were named after Wards of the City of London – Castle Baynard, Candlewick, Newgate, Cordwainer, Dowgate, Cripplegate, Broad Street and Queenhithe.

After opening, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Mermaid Theatre was generally successful. An almost continuous run of different productions, apparently able to attract many of the leading actors of the time, as well as good audience numbers, although finances were always a challenge.

Bernard Miles and Josephine Wilson had the role of artistic directors, and Bernard Miles would occasionally also appear in one of the Mermaid’s productions.

The symbol of the Mermaid Theatre, on all their programmes, advertising etc., from the 1959 opening, was a mermaid, as shown on the cover of the programme for the 1972 production of Noel Coward’s Cowardy Custard:

The Mermaid was often struggling financially, so as well as the revenue from ticket sales, the theatre was always looking for additional sources of revenue, and as with theatres today, food and drink made up a large part of this.

In the Mermaid Theatre, there was the Riverside Restaurant, the Tavern Restaurant, the Whitbread Bar, the Charrington Bar and a Snack Bar:

The cast list from the 1972 production of Cowardy Custard:

When the area around the Mermaid Theatre was redeveloped, the theatre had to close for an extended period of time. This work involved the reclamation of the foreshore, build of a new embankment and the move of Upper Thames Street from the north of the theatre to the new dual carriageway to the south, filling in Puddle Dock, and build of the new road alongside the theatre, and the build of all the new office blocks that today surround the theatre.

The new route of Upper Thames Street is shown by the red line on the earlier OS map extract.

Bernard Miles was able to get some support for the rebuild of the Mermaid Theatre out of the developers of all the change, and this resulted in the slightly enlarged theatre building that we see today. However it also cost the Mermaid a considerable sum of money, and in the programmes that went with their early 1980s productions, they advertised the:

“MERMAID APPEAL – The Mermaid Theatre Trust offers warn thanks to those who have contributed in cash and in kind to the rejuvenation of the theatre. BUT, the hard winter of 1979 and the medieval and Victorian obstacles underground slowed up our rebuilding and combined with inflation to push up the cost of completing our existing building by £100,000. PLEASE HELP TO TOP US UP.”

The medieval and Victorian obstacles underground highlights that when the 1959 Mermaid was built, it was mainly built within the ruins of an existing building, and there was no need to go down below the surface for the majority of construction work.

When the Mermaid reopened in 1981, the first production was a musical version of the 17th century play Eastward Ho. This was a financial disaster and lost £80,000, and over the next two years, losses kept increasing to reach a total of £650,000.

One of the 1981 productions was “Children Of A Lesser God”, which opened on the 25th of August, 1981:

Which starred Trevor Eve, Elizabeth Quinn, and Irene Sutcliffe:

The above programme was one of the last to list Bernard Miles and his wife Josephine Wilson as Artistic Directors.

Two years after reopening, debts were so bad that the Trustees were forced to put the Mermaid up for sale.

Bernard Miles and Josephine Wilson stepped down as Artistic Directors.

The Mermaid Theatre was purchased by Ugandan Asian businessman Abdul Shamji through his property company Gomba Holdings.

Shamji was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment in 1989 following the collapse of the Johnson Matthey Bank, and the Mermaid Theatre then went through a series of different owners, and with different artistic directors and managers, however the theatre never reached the success in terms of productions, actors and audiences that it had done under Bernard Miles (although it had always struggled financially).

In 2000 it was basically a redundant building, and in 2002 it was scheduled for demolition as part of a redevelopment plan for the area (which never materialised), and in 2003 the Mayor of London blocked any demolition.

The theatre was used for a number of BBC concerts, and the formal end of the building as a theatre came in 2008 when the Corporation of London City Planning Committee removed the theatre license from the Mermaid Theatre.

When the Mermaid was opened in 1959, it was the first theatre in the City of London for almost 300 years, by the time the theatre was redundant, the City of London had a theatre at the Barbican, so there was probably no perceived need to, or interest in financially supporting the smaller Mermaid.

The building was then turned into an exhibition and conference centre, a role it continues to this day

Bernard Miles was recognised for his work both as an actor and with the Mermaid Theatre as in 1953 he was made a CBE, he was knighted in 1969 and in 1979 he was made a Life Peer as Lord Miles of Blackfriars in the City of London.

His choice as being titled “Lord Miles of Blackfriars” probably indicates his deep connection with Blackfriars and the Mermaid.

Whilst the Mermaid building is a reminder of Bernard Miles’ original dream of a new theatre in the City of London, there is almost nothing to remember Bernard Miles or Josephine Wilson around Puddle Dock.

The one exception requires a walk up to the walkway on Baynard House (one of the office blocks that were built as part of the major redevlopment of the area – the walkway can be accessed from stairs on Queen Victoria Street, and provides access to Blackfriars Station).

In this gradually decaying space can be found the Seven Ages of Man sculpture by Richard Kindersly:

A plaque on one of the side plinths near the sculpture records that the work was unveiled by Lord Miles of Blackfriars on the 23rd of April, 1980:

Bernard Miles continued to act after stepping down from the Mermaid Theatre, but these roles must have been difficult given his previous 30 years involvement with the Mermaid, from the initial idea through to stepping down as artistic director.

In 1983, he took on the role of Firs, the old retainer, in Lindsay Anderson’s production of the Cherry Orchard, at the same time as what could have been considered his very own cherry orchard, the Mermaid, was being sold.

Bernard Miles and his wife Josephine Wilson had put almost all their own money into the Mermaid Theatre, and in 1989 they had to move from their four bedroomed house in Canonbury to a flat.

Josephine died in 1990, she had been Bernard Mile’s strongest and most consistent supporter throughout their life together, and during the whole period of the Mermaid, from the original idea through to the loss of their roles with the theatre.

After the death of his wife, Bernard moved into a Middlesex nursing home, and it was rumoured that he only had his state pension to live on.

The Mermaid Theatre’s new management staged a gala benefit in his honour, and despite being confined to a wheel chair, and also partially deaf, we was able to hear the many tributes that were paid to him, whilst in the theatre that had been his main life’s work.

Bernard Miles died on the 14th of June, 1991. Obituaries after his death celebrate his role in the founding of the Mermaid Theatre and the challenges that he overcame in getting the idea of the theatre from a bomb damaged warehouse through to a working theatre in the City of London.

They also identify a number of shortcomings, that perhaps he never recognised his shortcomings as an actor, that he wanted to take on the great roles of theatre, but in the words of one obituary “he played them and was terrible in all of them”.

He was strongly loyal to his old actor and director friends, but again was blind to their inadequacies.

He also failed to listen to advice when he had an idea and wanted to see it through, which was one of the reasons why the Mermaid frequently struggled financially.

Despite these shortcomings, he was widely remembered with affection and for his achievement in bringing the Mermaid to the City of London, long before the Royal Shakespeare Company were established at the Barbican.

I have tried to visit the Mermaid, and to take some photos, however there has been no response to my requests.

A walk around the outside of the theatre shows the Mermaid surrounded by the developments of the 1970s / 80s, but this could all change as there are proposals for a wholesale redevelopment of the area, and it is one part of London that does need to change – one of the most unfriendly pedestrian places you will find in the City of London.

Nothing appears to remain from before the theatre was built (although I would love to know what is underneath the Mermaid), however I did find these two strange red painted metal objects to either side of one of the doors to the theatre:

They appear to be made of iron, and are completly out of place with their surroundings. Two thirds of the way up, there is a slot on both objects, the type of slot that looks as if a wooden plank would have been inserted to bar the way.

It would be interesting to know if these are survivors from the time before the Mermaid was built.

The Mermaid Theatre is a fascinating story of how one man’s single minded devotion to an idea, led to the founding of the first new theatre in the City of London in almost 300 years, and in many ways, also led to its downfall.

I hope in the redevelopment of the area, the story of Bernard Miles, Josephine Wilson, and the Mermaid Theatre does not get lost.

You may also be interested in my post on Puddle Dock And a City Laystall, and Queen Victoria Street and Upper Thames Street – A Lost Road Junction.

I will also be running the walk “The Lost Landscape and Transformation of Puddle Dock and Thames Street” in the summer of next year. Follow here on Eventbrite to get updates when new walks are available.

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Royal Victoria Dock in 2024 – Part 2

One ticket has just become available for my walk this Saturday, the 2nd of November, exploring the Lost Street of the Barbican. Click here for details and booking.

In today’s post, I am continuing my walk around the Royal Victoria Dock, completing the second half of the walk, along with a couple of short diversions to look at how the area around the dock along with Silvertown has, and continues to be, redeveloped.

The following map shows the route of today’s post, starting at the circle at lower right, which was where I ended the walk in the previous post, and ending at Royal Victoria DLR station at upper left  (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

And this was my first diversion away from the dock, with a walk down to see the Thames Barrier Park:

Thames Barrier Park was completed, and opened in November 2000. Whilst it is a “normal” park, consisting of open green space, trees etc. there is one really unique feature in the park, which can be seen in the map on the poster.

This is a slightly angled, 130 foot long sunken garden, which has parallel lines of planting and hedges, which have been trimmed to give the impression of a series of waves running along the length of the garden.

The following view is looking along the sunken garden from the north, down to the Thames Barrier, which can just be seen in the distance:

I did wonder if the sunken garden occupied the space of a dock, however after checking OS maps of the area, there was no dock covering the length of the garden, although there was a small dock that covered part of the lower section of the sunken garden, towards the river, so whilst this may have been the inspiration for the sunken garden, the large area we see today was down to the construction of the park.

The site was occupied by chemical works (as was so much of the Silvertown riverside), with petrochemical and acid products being processed and manufactured. So great was the contamination of the soil, that a six foot layer of crushed concrete was placed on top of the original ground level to protect the new topsoil.

Whilst I can see that this applied to the area of the park surrounding the sunken garden, as this part of the park is slightly raised, the land of the sunken garden must have been specially treated.

Looking north along the sunken garden, where a DLR train can be seen entering the Pontoon Dock station:

The park is named after the Thames Barrier, and there is a good view of the barrier from the southern end of the park:

The following photo is looking to the east along the river, showing the gently sloping foreshore along this part of the river, along with new apartment buildings and industrial sites on the far side of the river:

Walking back up to North Woolwich Road, and we can see one of the defining industrial features of the area, the Grade II listed Grain Silo D:

Grain Silo D was built in the early 1920s alongside one of the finger channels in Pontoon Dock, off the south side of the Royal Victoria Dock.

The silo was used to extract and store grain from ships moored in the channel alongside, using either a bucket conveyor or by a suction elevator. Grain in the silo would be transported onwards, either by barge, or by the rail network that crossed the area between the mills to the south of the Royal Victoria Dock, and the wider rail network.

Silo D was built on the site of an original silo which was damaged in the Silvertown explosion of January 1917 (the subject of a future post). The following 1921 photo from Britain from Above shows Silo D under final construction to lower left, with the original silos A, B, and C surrounding the new silo (Image Source: EPW006144 ENGLAND (1921). Industrial buildings and wharfage, Silvertown, 1921):

In the above photo, you can see the rail tracks to the left of the silos, with a shed covering part of the track next to each silo. Grain would have been transported by conveyor belt from the silos to the sheds, where is was loaded onto the goods wagons on the rail network, for processing in the nearby Millennium Mills.

Silo D is Grade II listed, and will be retained within the extensive redevelopment which is taking place around Pontoon Dock. It will have its own “Quarter” – the Silo D Quarter, where the building will sit alongside the retained dock water, but surrounded by new developments.

You can see an image of the future location of Silo D by scrolling down a short distance on the Lendlease Silvertown website, by clicking here.

.Another “Quarter” in the redevelopment of the area around Pontoon Dock is the Mills Quarter, which will be based around the old Millennium Mills. At the top of the Lendlease Silvertown website page accessed via the above link, is an image of the rear of the Millennium Mills buildings, once development of the area is complete.

The rear of the building as seen in 2024:

The map at the top of the page on the Lendlease Silvertown website shows just how large the redevelopment is, along the south east section of the Royal Victoria Dock.

Whilst redevelopment of the area that has been derelict for so long is much needed, as are the homes that will be built, the issue I have is the identikit design of the buildings, very similar to almost all other areas of London also undergoing development.

Also, the way (particularly with Silo D), new buildings appear to crowd around those that remain from the working docks.

Having said that, this type of identical housing blocks is a similar approach to the streets of terrace housing that covered so much of the land over which London expanded during the 19th and early decades of the 20th centuries.

There is very little left of pre-war housing around Silvertown. One stretch is along Mill Road just to the west of Silo D, where there is a row of houses on the eastern side of the street, although only the first ten are pre-war, the rest of the street (from just past the lamp post along the street) dates from the late 1950s / early 1960:

In the above photo, a chimney can be seen at the end of Mill Road, and walking to the northern end of the street, close to the Royal Victoria Dock, we can see the chimney in the centre of a roundabout:

I will show the original surroundings of the chimney later in the post as it is a remarkable survivor, however at the end of Mill Road, we can see the western side of the Millennium Mills complex:

Along with the rear of Silo D:

And by the roundabout with the chimney at the centre, if we look at one of the turn offs from the roundabout, which ends abruptly at a gate, we can see the Millennium Mills buildings:

The Millennium Mills we see today are not the original buildings bearing the name.

The Royal Victoria Dock was long a centre for grain storage and flour milling, and the company William Vernon & Sons built the first Millennium Mills in 1905 to mill flour.

Vernon’s produced flour using the brand name “Millennium Flour”, and they won awards and gained a considerable market, based on advertising which featured the quality of their flour, and the expertise that went into their milling process, for example, from the Evening News on Saturday the 13th of February 1909:

“Science controls the ‘Millennium’ Mills. It dictates the operations resulting in ‘Millennium’ Flour, which the good housewife knows makes the best-flavoured and most nutritious bread on the market. Say ‘MILLENNIUM’ to Baker – always.”

And from the Evening News on Friday the 23rd of April 1909:

“Millennium Flour cannot be surpassed. All that science can do has been done at ‘Millennium’ Mills to ensure the production of perfect flour. only the highest grade wheat is used, and absolute cleanliness in every process is insisted upon. Say ‘Millennium’ to Baker – always.”

Vernon’s milling and cleanliness was such that they also advertised that their flour was the purest white on the market.

As well as alongside the Royal Victoria Dock in London, Vernon’s also had a similar mill in Liverpool, another port where imported grain was received. In 1910 they were advertising “Remarkable Facts” about the capacity of their two mills, with:

“The daily capacity of the Millennium Mills is equal to an output of 9,600 bags of 140 lbs. each; i.e. about 3,000,000 per annum – sufficient to supply the seven million people of London with bread for two months and a half.

The loading out capacity into barges or lighters at each mill is 3,000 bags per hour. the Granary departments have a storage capacity of 250,000 sacks of wheat.”

The original Millennium Mills buildings were damaged in the Silvertown explosion, with the mill back in full operation in 1920 as William Vernon & Sons were advertising an auction of all the surplus material left over from the rebuilding process, which included 30,000 stock bricks, 3 Tons of bolts, ladders, barrows, tools etc.

In the same year, William Vernon & Sons amalgamated with Spillers Ltd, another business who started as flour millers in Bridgewater, Somerset in 1829, (although it looks more like a take over by Spillers).

Throughout the 1920s, the business was expanding rapidly, and in the following decades, the buildings alongside the Royal Victoria Dock were rebuilt. Luckily, the buildings have their year of construction at the very top, so going back to the photo above, the smaller building on the right dates from 1933:

And the larger building on the left dates from 1954, which was part of the post war rebuild of the site following bomb damage during the Second World War:

Whilst the name of William Vernon, the company that originally started milling at the Royal Victoria Dock has disappeared, the brand name of their flour “Millennium” can still be seen on the mill building today, alongside the name of the company that took them over – “Spillers”:

The end came n 1981 with the closure of the Royal Docks, although the mill had been in decline for some years before.

And since closure it has remained empty and derelict, but has been been used in numerous films, TV programmes, music videos and, in the case of Jean-Michel Jarre’s Destination Docklands, the building was painted white and used as a backdrop for the concert.

Music videos that have included the mill, along with other views of the docks include Ask by the Smiths:

And Take Back the City by Snow Patrol:

Along with Fluorescent Adolescent by the Artic Monkeys:

There are many others.

From the roundabout, there is a view of the chimney and the Millennium Mills:

And using one of the photos from Britain from Above, it is possible to locate where the chimney was, in relation to the rest of the buildings that were on the site, both remaining and demolished (Image source: https://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/EAW035762)

The arrows point to the following:

  • The red arrow is pointing to the chimney that now stands alone at the centre of a small roundabout
  • The oranage arrow is pointing to the 1933 building that can be seen today
  • The yellow arrow points to the 1954 building, which can also be seen today
  • The green arrow is pointing to the infrastructure that was used to extract grain from ships and move to the mill buildings. i have included my father’s photo of these structures from his 1953 visit, below:

I have now reached the edge of the dock, and one of the first areas that was redeveloped around the Royal Victoria Dock – Britannia Village:

Britannia Village occupies the south west corner of the Royal Victoria Dock and was built during the 1990s and consists of, by today’s standards, relatively low rise housing, typically up to four or five floors.

Between the houses that face onto the dock, and the dock, there is a walkway along the old quay, where a number of original cranes have been retained:

The cranes are all Grade II listed, and were made by Stothert and Pitt Cranes of Bath. The majority date from 1962, however there are two 1920 cranes included in those still standing around the dock.

All the industry that once surround the Royal Docks has long gone, as has the majority of industry along the river, however there were two places that I wanted to find that have survived, because they are dependent on the river rather than the docks.

I will cover the main site when I walk around the Royal Albert and King George V docks, but for today, it was a short walk south from the south west corner of the Royal Victoria Dock to find the factory that makes Lyle’s Golden Syrup:

Abram Lyle was born in Greenock, Scotland in 1820 and operated a cooperage and shipping business, with many of his ships transporting sugar cane.

In 1881, he expanded on this involvement in the sugar trade, by building a sugar refinery along the Thames.

Part of the process to refine sugar produces a thick treacle like substance, and Lyle used this byproduct to produce a syrup which could be used in cooking and as a sweetener. This was originally called “Goldie”.

The name soon changed to Lyle’s Golden Syrup, and in 1885, the syrup was sold for the first time in tins, with the same branding that has survived to this day (the company holds a Guinness World Record for the longest running brand), and the company today has one of the tins on the corner of their building:

The trademark on the tin names Abram Lyle & Sons, Sugar Refiners, with an image of a lion in the centre surrounded by bees. This image is a result of Abram Lyle’s religious convictions as the image is based on a story in the Old Testament of the Bible of Samson’s lion and bees, which results in the slogan “Out of the strong came forth sweetness”, which can be seen just below the lion.

Abram Lyle’s company merged with the sugar refining company of Henry Tate, who also had a nearby sugar refinery (in a later post), to form Tate & Lyle.

Tate & Lyle sold their sugar refining business, which included Lyle’s Golden Syrup in 2010 to American Sugar Refining, Inc. (part of their ASR name can just be seen in the above photo), with Tate & Lyle focusing on specialty ingredients. Part of the sale included American Sugar Refining continuing to use the Tate & Lyle and Lyle’s Golden Syrup branding.

The factory on the banks of the Thames today produces over one million tins of Lyle’s Golden Syrup, which is also sold in different formats such as plastic bottles, and is exported across the world.

A wonderful survivor from when this part of the river was end to end industry.

To the east of the Lyle’s factory is a large open space, which is not included in the main Silvertown development to the south of the Royal Victoria Dock, and around Pontoon Dock, however its location next to the river makes it a prime future redevelopment site:

After this brief diversion, I have returned to the Royal Victoria Dock, and am now at the south west corner, looking east along the dock:

To the left, I can see the western end of the Royal Victoria Dock, indeed of the whole Royal Docks complex. Where the white floats in the water are located was the locked entrance between the River Thames and the Royal Victoria Dock, the original and only entrance when the Victoria Dock was first built:

This locked entrance was completely filled in after the closure of the docks, but the outline of the entrance can still be seen at this corner of the dock. To the right is the latest site of City Hall – the location of the Mayor of London and London Authority.

And from the end of the dock, I can look east along the full length of the Royal Victoria Dock, a view which shows the sheer scale of this dock, just one of three that eventually made up the Royal Docks complex:

In the above photo, the thin line of the walkway bridge that spans the dock roughly half way along can be seen in the distance.

Zooming in, we can see the bridge, and behind that the Connaught Bridge where the Royal Victoria meet the Royal Albert Dock, and this later dock is much longer than the Victoria:

There is very little that has survived from the time when the docks were operational. The cranes are the most obvious features, and at this western end of the dock there is an old capstan:

Which was also made by Stothert and Pitt of Bath, the same company that made the cranes that remain around the dock:

Looking across the western end of the dock, and we can see the start (or end) of the cable car that runs over the river to the Greenwich Peninsula:

Before continuing round the western end of the docks, I took another quick diversion down towards the river, to see a construction site for a new route across the river that will soon be operational:

This is a large area between the west end of the Royal Victoria Dock, and the river, all to the west of the Lyle Golden Syrup factory. Boarded off so it is not yet possible to walk down to the river, and with part of the Docklands Light Railway running across, which provides a good view of the site:

This is the site on the north of the river where the Silvertown Tunnel is being constructed.

The Silvertown Tunnel is expected to open in 2025 and and as well as lanes for traffic, it will also include a dedicated bus lane. First proposed in 2012, the tunnel is intended to address congestion issues at the Blackwall Tunnel by providing additional capacity across the river.

Construction of the Silvertown Tunnel along with ongoing operation and maintenance has all been privately financed, and when the tunnel opens there will be a charge applied to vehicles using the tunnel, and to stop people continuing to use the Blackwall Tunnel as a free alternative, a charge will also be introduced to use the Blackwall Tunnel.

Looking through one of the access gates to the construction site, we can see the distinctive building that is on top of the northern access portal to the tunnel, where traffic running to and from Silvertown Way and Lower Lea Crossing, will be able to access the tunnel to and from the Greenwich Peninsula:

When complete, the area around the tunnel portal will be landscaped, and completion of construction work will free up a considerable area of land around the portal, and down to the Thames for further development.

It will be interesting to return towards the end of next year when the tunnel should be in operation. It will continue to be a construction site, but then probably lots of apartment blocks.

Returning to the western end of the Royal Victoria Dock and this is the new City Hall building, home of the Mayor of London and the London Authority:

The building was originally called the Crystal and was built by the engineering company Siemens and opened in 2012 as an exhibition centre, learning and global knowledge hub focusing on the future of the city and on sustainability.

When it opened, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London said that “It is a clear sign of the confidence in London’s ability to nurture and support eco-enterprises that Siemens has chosen to locate its flagship centre of sustainability here in the UK capital. The Crystal is set to sit at the heart of a brand new Green Enterprise District, which will sweep across east of the city. We envisage that the district will be a vibrant, international hub incubating dozens of low carbon businesses.”

Four years later, Siemens sold the building back to the Greater London Authority and left the building a few years later after an early surrender of their 7 year lease on the building.

In 2021, the London Authority used a break clause in their lease of the City Hall building on the south of the Thames, next to Tower Bridge. The London Authority did not own the original City Hall, it was leased from the the Kuwaiti owned St Martin’s Property Group, who also own the surrounding land and buildings between Hay’s Wharf and Tower Bridge.

The move to a building the London Authority already owned was planned to saved a large amount of money over the following years, along with being part of the regeneration of the Royal Docks complex, by moving a significant London institution, along with a large number of staff, to the docks.

It is interesting that the London Authority and Mayor of London are now based in a building that was until 1965, part of Essex, when the implementation of the London Government Act 1963 transferred the area to the east of the River Lea from Essex to Greater London.

The same comment applies to the Royal Docks, as for most of their operational life, they were in Essex, rather than London.

in the same year as the Crystal building opened (2012), the cable car also opened, taking passengers across the river to the Greenwich Peninsula, and opposite the new City Hall building is the Royal Victoria Dock entrance to the cable car, where gondolas start their journey across the river:

The Cable Car has never been the success expected during planning, and after an initial peak of users after opening in 2012, the annual number of travelers on the cable car has dropped considerably, with summer peaks showing that the cable car is mainly used by visitors to the Royal Docks and Greenwich Peninsula, rather than commuters or workers.

The following graph shows the number of travelers in millions from 2012 on the left to April 2024. For the reporting period of 2023 / 2024, the maximum usage was 180,000 a month, with the minimum usage being 70,000 a month.

Gondolas leave and arrive over the Royal Victoria Dock:

I am now on my final part of the walk around the Royal Victoria Dock, and leaving the dock at the north west corner, I cross the Western Gateway, which is the main approach road to the Excel exhibition centre. Fully redeveloped with a bit of retail, hotels, restaurants and residential:

On the opposite side of the Western Gateway, where Seagull Lane heads to the DLR station, is this strange structure:

This was built between 1987 and 1988 as one of the early projects in the regeneration of the Royal Docks.

The building is one of the storm-water pumping stations around the docks, and the surface structure conceals the majority of the infrastructure which extends 25 metres below ground level. There are some interesting diagrams and photos of the pumping station here.

The blue painting of the circular structures is now rather faded. When completed, this was a deep blue, with red and yellow for additional features of the station.

These colours were chosen as “from the outset the building was meant to be a visual delight, an oasis in the drab industrial environment of Silvertown”.

Much of the area around the Royal Victoria Dock has changed considerably in the years since the pumping station was completed, and there is not that much of the “drab industrial environment” left.

And a short distance further, I reached the Royal Victoria DLR station, a fitting end to a walk around the whole of the Royal Victoria Dock:

I hope the last three posts on the Royal Docks and a walk around the Royal Victoria Dock has shown just how interesting the area is, from the vast area of the water that made up the original dock, to the way that the dock evolved and developed, the industries that surrounded the dock, and the potential future of the dock.

The development around Pontoon Dock, the old Millennium Mill and Silo D will be transformative in one way or another.

I just hope that some reference to the history of the docks survives and the story of those who built and worked at the docks is embedded into the new developments, and that the area does not become another densely packed area of identikit towers.

And to finish, if you would like to relive the Jean Michel Jarre, Destination Docklands concert back in 1988, held in the Royal Victoria Dock, with the mill buildings in the background, including the building that was in one of my father’s photos in last week’s post, before it was demolished a few years later, the film is here:

If I remember correctly, the concert was on a barge on the dock (which was probably why children in the choir were wearing lifejackets). I have no idea how the electrical equipment they were using continued to work given the very wet weather on the day.

I still have to cover the Royal Albert and King George VI Docks, however rather than a continuous run of posts on the Royal Docks, for next week’s post I will be visiting a very different place.

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Royal Victoria Dock in 2024 – Part 1

The Royal Docks decline started in the late 1960s / early 1970s with the gradual shift in goods transport to containerisation and much larger ships. The Thames was not deep enough to allow these ships to travel all the way to the London Docks, and the much larger ports specialising in supporting container traffic were being developed in Felixstowe and Southampton.

The last ship to be loaded in the Royal Docks left on the 7th of December 1981, and after that, the docks fell into a state of gradual dereliction.

The Docklands Joint Committee was formed in January 1974, and published the “London Docklands – A 1976 Strategic Plan”, which I have written about in this post. Apart from the development of some local housing, the report did not lead to any significant redevelopment of the London Docks, including the Royal Docks.

This would come in the 1980s, with the founding in 1981 of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC), an agency set up specifically to drive the redevelopment of the docklands to the east of London, both north and south of the river.

The Royal Docks came within the LDDC’s responsibility, and their many publications provide a record of their intentions for the docks, plans for redevelopment, and how this was being achieved.

One such publication from 1990, as development of the Royal Docks was underway was “London Docklands – Royal Docks”, one of a series of publications covering each of the main dock areas:

The photo on the front shows the renovation of one of the locked channels between the Thames and the docks. I suspect this is the lock between the King George V dock and the river, as it is the only remaining entrance to the docks that remains in place today, much as it did when the docks were fully operational. The photo gives an indication of the sheer scale of the dock entrances.

Unfolding the brochure provides a map of the Royal Docks, with details of:

  • Schemes Proposed, Underway or Completed
  • Major Development Schemes Being Discussed with Developers
  • Sites Expected to Become Available

The map shows the sheer scale of development proposed or planned, and this was just the Royal Docks, although they were by far the largest set of docks in London.

Many development sites were completed as expected, however there were many other sites that took much longer to be developed and ended up with very different use to that planned in 1990. Large areas of the Royal Docks are still be developed, and there are still places of dereliction.

It is a very interesting area to walk. The water area of the docks are slightly smaller than they were when operational, however they are still of a significant scale, and are very impressive as a man made structure.

There are a few buildings and features left from when the docks were operational, and much to see of what the Royal Docks have become.

So starting with today’s post, I am walking the first part of the Royal Victoria Dock. There is so much to see that I have had to split the overall walk into two posts. The map below shows the route covered in today’s post by the red line:

I am starting midway along the southern side of the Royal Victoria Dock, and one of the developments that was not included in the 1990 LDDC brochure is a very impressive pedestrian bridge that crosses the full width of the dock:

The bridge was commissioned by the LDDC and was opened on the 7th of October, 1997 by Glenda Jackson, the actress, who was also an MP and Minister of Transport in London at the time.

There are lifts at each end of the bridge, however these have always been unreliable and were not correctly designed for their exposed location. Challenges with sourcing spares, which often had to be custom made, ever increasing cost and unreliability has resulted in the Royal Docks Management Authority Limited suspending any further maintenance of the lifts, and they did not appear to be working on the day of my visit.

Instead, I took the 80 steps up to the top of the footbridge, and it is well worth the effort for the views.

Although the lifts are not maintained, the rest of the bridge is, and when I walked across there were repairs to the floor of the walkway being undertaken:

A walk across the bridge provides an idea of the sheer scale of these docks. This is a view looking east of just over half of the Royal Victoria Dock, with the old Millennium Mills buildings on the right and the Excel Exhibition Centre on the left:

At the far end of the Royal Victoria Dock are the Royal Albert and King George V docks, and between these is the runway of London City Airport:

On the other side of the bridge, along the south west corner of the dock, there has been considerable residential development with cranes along the edge of the dock providing a reminder of the dock’s heritage (this is area 38 in the LDDC map):

A close up of Millennium Mill – I will be looking at these buildings in detail in part 2 of the walk:

The view looking to the west, the remaining half of the dock from the footbridge:

At the far end of the dock. to the left is the outline of the old entrance between the Royal Victoria Dock and the Thames, just a small part of where the locked entrance reached the main dock area. This was one of the first parts of the old dock infrastructure to be filled in and was not shown in the 1990 LDDC brochure.

To the right is the City Hall building, the latest home of the Mayor of London, London Assembly and the Greater London Authority, after leaving the building on the south of the river by Tower Bridge:

The Excel Exhibition Centre occupies the majority of the north bank of the dock:

Go back to the LDDC brochure, and the map shows that at area 31 there was planned a “Mixed development comprising arena and exhibition centre, housing, business accommodation, leisure, retail and community facilities”.

This mix does generally seem to have been achieved. Using the bridge as a dividing point, to the left of the bridge there is residential, business accommodation, hotels and some retail and leisure, and to the right of the bridge is the Excel arena and exhibition centre.

At the base of the bridge on the north side of the dock is the Sunborn London Yacht Hotel:

When writing this post, I had a quick look at pricing for a room on the yacht, and if you read this on the Sunday of publication, this evening, you could have a room with a dock view for £141 with an additional £35 for breakfast. This goes up to £977 for a suite with the “Ultimate Romantic Getaway” package.

A very different ship, and very different use to when the dock was originally in use.

In front of the main entrance to the exhibition centre is one of my favourite London statues:

The statue shows three dockers. At the rear is a Tally Clerk who is recording in his notebook the goods being moved, on the left is a docker attaching the chains from a crane to the pallet holding the cargo being moved, and on the right is a docker pushing a trolley that was used to move goods between the quayside and transit shed / warehouse.

The figures depicted are based on real dockers, Johnny Ringwood, Patrick Holland, and Mark Tibbs. It was Johnny Ringwood who campaigned for the statue, and the Royal Docks Trust, ExceL Exhibition Centre and a contribution from the Queen Mother raised the £250,000 needed to complete the work by the sculptor Les Johnson.

It was put in place in 2009, and there is a article on the BBC website showing Johnny Ringwood visiting the sculpture earlier this year. The article can be found here.

The importance of the role of the Tally Clerk (the figure in the sculpture with the notebook) can be seen in the following newspaper article from 1951:

“More tally clerks from London docks struck today in sympathy with tally clerks at the Royal group of docks who struck yesterday.

The National Dock Board announced that 913 tally clerks are on strike and 2,770 dockers are unable to work without them.

London’s biggest docks – the Royal group – were almost idle today because the Dock Board engaged a tally clerk who was a member of the union but not of the local branch.

More than 200 tally clerks staged a lightning unofficial strike last night claiming the Dock Board had broken the agreement not to recruit more tally clerks.

More than 30 ships in the docks are held up, including the Eva Peron with the first shipment of Argentine beef since the new agreement was signed.

Warehouses and dock space are choked with export goods waiting to be loaded after food and raw materials are unloaded.”

As well as the figures being of real dockers, the other feature I like requires a close look at the cargo. A bit difficult to see, but the various items on the pallet are marked with the country of origin – Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Australia, and below the name of Hong Kong is Johnny Ringwood’s name:

The main entrance of the Excel Exhibition Centre:

Rather than Excel, I should use the correct name format of ExCeL, which stands for Exhibition Centre London – which does make the use of a second London at the top of the main entrance rather redundant.

The first phase of the building opened in November 2000, with a second phase, which extended the building along the side of the dock, opening in 2010. There is a third phase currently under construction.

In 2008 it was purchased by the Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company, as can be seen on the main entrance.

The centre has hosted numerous large and small events. One that made use of the dock was the London Boat Show where large and small boats and ships were transported to the centre via the river and into the dock. Large ships were often moored alongside the dock when the show was on.

If you have not visited an exhibition or conference at the centre, you are probably aware of it from publicity in 2020 when it was one of the NHS Nightingale Hospitals, set up during the Covid pandemic.

It was equipped with 4,000 temporary beds, however I have seen references that it was only ever used by 54 Covid patients, and after opening in April 2020, it closed in April 2021.

There is an interesting video showing the transformation of Excel into a hospital, supported by the military, here:

There is not that much left from the time when the Royal Docks were operational, apart from the large expanse of water, however, just to the north of the main entrance to Excel, there is Warehouse K:

This impressive run of brick warehouses is Grade II listed and was built between 1850 and 1855, the same time as the Victoria Dock was under construction.

They were original a tobacco warehouse and was the first warehouse in London to be designed specifically for servicing by the railway. in this extract from the 1892 OS map, you can see Warehouse K marked, with the double line of a rail track running in front of the building, with the rail tracks running back to connect to the main lines of the railways supporting the Royal Docks (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

I then headed down to the walkway between exhibition centre and dock, to walk along side the dock to the far end:

There are still plenty of these quayside mooring bollards in place, and they look identical to the bollard in one of my father’s 1953 photos in the last post:

One of the pleasures of writing the blog, is that I learn loads from the comments, and apparently these bollards were also called Dockers’ Mistresses. See this post from Jane’s London for an explanation.

A short distance along, and the pathway was blocked by an event at the Excel, and by construction work on phase 3 towards the far end of the centre. Very frustrating as I could not get to the point where my father had taken a couple of photos looking across the dock to buildings on the far side.

View looking across to the Millennium Mill:

And to the area which appears to have been in the background in my father’s photo of a bollard in the last post:

So the only way to get to the far end was to retreat back to the main entrance of the Excel Centre, and catch the DLR from Custom House to the next stop at Prince Regent.

The bridge at Prince Regent Station provides an interesting view of the network of railway lines that can still be found around the Royal Docks.

In the following photo, the rail track on the right is the DLR leavoing Prince Regent Station and heading to the Royal Albert Station.

The tracks on the left are those of the Elizabeth Line, which are about to enter the Connaught Tunnel, which takes the Elizabeth Line under the docks to Silvertown, where it then enters another tunnel to pass under the Thames. I will cover the Connaught Tunnel later in this post:

Because of construction work for phase 3 of the Excel Centre, there was no direct route from Prince Regent Station to the dockside, so I took a slightly longer route via Royal Albert Way, and then via a footpath towards Connaught Bridge, as I wanted to find the building shown in the following photo:

This is the Fox Connaught which advertises that it is a “traditional pub in London’s Royal Docks” – and there are very few of those left.

The pub was built in the early 1880s, and was called simply the Connaught. The pub’s website claims that “our pub began by serving passengers arriving at the bustling Victoria Docks” however the following is an article from Building News on the 1st of August, 1884 which claims a different first use;

“CONNAUGHT TAVERN, ROYAL ALBERT DOCK – This tavern was the first of a group recently built by the London and St. Katherine’s Dock Company, for the accommodation of workmen employed at the New Royal Albert Dock. On account of the nature of the subsoil – which for about 30 feet under the ground level is composed of peat – a secure foundation was obtained by piling. The walls are faced with red bricks and the roofs covered with tiles. The building was erected by Messrs. Perry and Co., Tredegar Works, Bow. Mr. George Vigers is the architect.”

The above article is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly it describes the nature of the subsoil, with a 30 foot layer of peat below ground level. This was Plaistow Marsh, and it did complicate the construction of the main dock complex.

The article references the Connaught Tavern being built for the accommodation of workmen employed at the new Royal Albert Dock. The number of workmen on the dock would have far exceeded the number that could have been housed in the building, and I would also be surprised if the dock company had built such a quality building for workmen constructing the dock. It may have been built for the more managerial workers, those responsible for the design, engineering and construction of the dock.

When the dock was completed, it probably was used, as the tavern’s website states, for passengers arriving at the docks, as well as a growing local population.

The walls of the pub have some lovely decoration, including this brick relief of a large sailing ship:

Walking from the Connaught Tavern, I am back at the Royal Victoria Dock, looking west along the dock with the exhibition centre on the right:

Looking down the full length of the dock:

It is here, at the eastern end of the Royal Victoria Dock, that I cross the channel between the Victoria and Albert Docks. There are a couple of relics from the old docks to be found:

Including this round brick structure:

The structure is one of two air vents to the Connaught Tunnel, a tunnel that was built to take the railway underneath the docks, at the point where the Victoria and Albert Docks meet.

The Connaught Tunnel is not a bored, deep tunnel, rather a tunnel constructed using the cut and cover technique.

It was built in 1878 to take the Stratford to North Woolwich line under the dock. This railway line was George Parker Bidder’s original railway to North Woolwich, built before the Royal Docks, (see the first post on the Royal Docks), and was running to the eat of the Victoria Dock, and was therefore an obstruction to the construction of the Albert Dock.

The Dock Extension Committee formed to manage the construction of the Albert Dock, looked at a number of options, including rerouting the railway (this was impossible as the combination of the Victoria and Albert Docks formed a continuous run of water between the Thames in the east and in the west), and also a bridge, but the issues with this option were the number of times that the bridge would need to be opened to allow ships to pass, and difficulties getting the railway company to accept this, as well as the compensation they would almost certainly claim.

A tunnel was the only option for rerouting the railway and getting it across the dock complex.

The tunnel consists of a cutting on either end with arched buttresses to provide support for the side walls, then the tunnel which was built using a concrete roof.

The tunnel is not far below the surface as in 1935, the Connaught Passage – the name of the channel of water between Victoria and Albert Docks, was deepened, requiring the central section of the tunnel which passes below the Connaught Passage to be lowered. When this work was carried out, the central brick lined section was replaced with a steel lining.

Air vents were required, as when designed and opened, the railway carried steam trains so a method was needed to vent steam and smoke to the surface.

The railway to North Woolwich closed in 2006, and the tunnel fell into disuse.

The Connaught Tunnel was a perfect route to get beneath the dock and head to a tunnel to cross below the Thames when Crossrail / the Elizabeth Line was planned.

A significant amount of restoration work was required to get the tunnel into a condition that it could be used for the Elizabeth line, but today, if you take the Elizabeth Line to Woolwich, you are travelling along the route of this old tunnel, and crossing underneath the Royal Docks, just below the Connaught Passage.

The following OS map from 1951 shows the Connaught Passage, which is the channel between Victoria Dock on the left and Albert Dock on the right.

The route of the tunnel is highlighted by twin dashed lines and I have highlighted the location of the two brick air vents with red arrows (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

The overall height of the air vent, including the sub-surface structure is 14.69m, from the track bed of the railway to the top of the exterior brickwork of the surface air vent.

There is a good Crossrail video on the Connaught Tunnel, here:

And another Crossrail video showing a journey through the Connaught Tunnel in its new role as a route for the Elizabeth Line, here:

As well as the two vents to the tunnel, there was a brick pump house on the surface, which contained equipment and a shaft down to where a culvert brought in water from the tunnel, where it was then pumped into the Royal Albert Dock.

The pump house has disappeared (this structure, as well as the two air vents are not listed), however there is a new circular structure in (if my memory is right) the same place, so possibly there is still a need to pump water from the tunnel, or possibly Crossrail work waterproofed the tunnel.

I will leave the Elizabeth Line running below the surface, and I will cross over the Connaught Passage, between the Albert and Victoria Docks, via the footbridge, which, as the green light demonstrates, has the capability to open, when a ship needs to pass between the two docks.

Looking under the Connaught Road Bridge to the Royal Albert Dock:

Looking along the full length of the Royal Victoria Dock from the passage into the Royal Albert:

After crossing the Connaught Passage, I find the second air vent, along with these strange metal vents. No idea of their purpose, and whether they are connected to the Elizabeth Line tunnel below:

The Connaught bridge carries the road over the Connaught passage, but I am walking underneath the bridge between the north and south side of the docks:

When looking at the bridge, it is hard to imagine that this large structure is actually a swing bridge, or more accurately, a cable stayed swing bridge.

I found the following rather shaky but remarkable video of the swing bridge in operation:

And by the side of the approach road to the Connaught Bridge, we are also along side London City Airport, and the yellow poles and lighting for the runway approach:

At the southern end of Connaught Road is a roundabout with the statue “Athena”:

Athena was installed in 2012, and at 12 metres high, is the tallest bronze sculpture in the country. It was the work of Nasser Azam, a contemporary artist based in London.

Although there is a road on the roundabout leading into the area to the south of the Royal Victoria Dock, it is fenced off, with no access, as this part of the Royals is still small industrial / derelict land.

It is the areas labeled 40 and 39 in the LDDC map at the top of the post.

My only route to get back to the dock was to walk down to the North Woolwich Road and follow that for a while before returning to the dock.

This is the view to the east whilst walking from the roundabout down to the North Woolwich Road. Part of the Excel exhibition centre can just be seen between the trees on the right, indicating where the dock is located.

How streets end in this area to the south of the Royal Victoria Dock:

A lucky photo – a British Airways flight taking of from London City Airport next to the Royal Albert Dock, with a higher aircraft turning over east London to join the south London approach to Heathrow airport:

Another dead end:

This whole area to the south of the Royal Victoria Dock (39 and 40 in the LDDC map) is scheduled for significant development over the coming years.

The Royal Docks Delivery Plan 2024 – 2029 by the Royal Docks Team, Mayor of London and Newham Council describes this part of the Royal Docks as the 20 hectare site around Pontoon Dock, being developed by the Silvertown Partnership, with a target of over 6,500 new homes.

The plan also includes a new curving bridge across the Royal Victoria Dock. This bridge will be slightly above ground level to provide a much easier pedestrian and cycling route across the dock, if you do not want to take the high level bridge, or the lifts are not working (which appears to be almost all the time). The bridge will connect the new Silvertown development around Pontoon Dock with Custom House DLR station.

The Royal Docks Delivery Plan is a glossy document of almost 90 pages, but what I find rather depressing about the plan is what appears to be an almost complete lack of any inclusion of the industrial heritage of the place – why the docks are here, what they did, why they were important and the people who worked in the docks.

I did a search for the word “heritage” in the document, and there are ten uses of heritage, but they are all rather bland uses such as “We want to unlock the area’s remarkable heritage, landscape, and character to establish a vibrant new waterfront for the city where people can live, work, and thrice for generations to come.”

And in the Mayor of London’s Forward: “With its strong transport links and rich heritage, we’re harnessing the Royal Docks unique landscape and character to create a stunning new waterfront for London – a place where people can live, work and thrive for generations to come.”

But will there be anything to inform all those people living and working in those future generations of the history of the Royal Docks rather than it just being a rather nice waterfront to drink your expensive coffee alongside?

Information panel showing development plans:

Walking along the North Woolwich Road, I came to probably one of the most photographed derelict buildings around the Royal Docks (apart from the Millennium Mill). This is Georges Diner:

Georges Diner has been closed and empty for almost 20 years, the business having left the building in 2005.

The land is owned by the Greater London Authority, and a list of the GLA’s vacant buildings published in 2015 listed the diner with a statement that it “will form part of the Silvertown Quays project”, and ten years later, the building is still waiting.

The diner was well known for serving one of the best fried breakfasts in the area, and was frequented by workers from the surrounding building sites, lorry drivers, utility workers, many attracted not just by the menu on offer, but also by the car / lorry park to the left of the building, which is still there, but fenced off along with the diner.

The diner sits on the land in Silvertown planned for development by 2029 in the Royal Docks Delivery Plan 2024 – 2029, so Georges Diner will probably be another part of the Royal Docks heritage consigned to history within the next few years.

That is the first part of my walk around the Royal Victoria Dock, and I hope it demonstrates that there is so much to explore around this historic dock. The very few buildings that remain from when the dock was operational, the way the dock is being developed, and the potential for future development..

In the second post, I will complete the walk around the Royal Victoria Dock, with a brief diversion to the Thames Barrier, see a unique industrial site, where a new tunnel is being built, and end at the Royal Victoria DLR station.

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The Royal Docks – Victoria, Albert and George V

For this week’s post, and for the next couple of weeks, I am visiting an area of London that I have not touched before in the blog. This is the area covered by Silvertown and North Woolwich, along with the Royal Docks – the Royal Victoria, Royal Albert and King George V Docks, the largest and last docks built in London (although at the time in the County of Essex), that covered a considerable amount of what had been Plaistow Marshes.

I am here because it is an interesting area, lots of history, has changed, and is changing after the closure of the docks, and because my father took a number of photos of the Royal Victoria Dock on a visit on Saturday the 11th of July, 1953, and the first photo is looking along the length of the Royal Victoria Dock, showing a large number of ships moored alongside the dock:

The rest of my father’s photos are later in the post, but first, a look at the history of the Royal Docks.

They can be found on a bend in the river, to the east of the Isle of Dogs, between Bugby’s Reach and Galleons Reach. The dock complex is seven miles from London Bridge.

The following map shows the area today (within the red oval), with the majority of the water surface area of the docks still to be found, although there has been some small loses to this space. I have marked the locations of the three component docks that make up the Royal Docks:

The Victoria, Albert and George V are all connected, so they can be considered as one single dock complex, and when the final dock, the King George V was completed, they were the largest sheet of open dock water in the world.

Between the westerly entrance to the Victoria Dock and the east entrance to the Albert Dock, is a length of three miles.

The three docks were constructed in stages:

  • The Victoria Dock was first, and opened in 1855:
  • Then came the Albert Dock in 1880, and;
  • The King George V Dock was the final dock, opened in 1921.

As with all the London Docks, from opening to final closure, they were continually modified and upgraded to take account of changing trade flows, cargos, ship sizes and methods of cargo handling.

When the Victoria Dock was opened, it was simply known as the Victoria Dock, the Royal was added when the Albert Dock opened, as the company building the dock applied to Queen Victoria for approval to use both the name Albert and add the word Royal to the two docks.

The following map shows the Royal Dock complex in the late 1920s:

Why were these new, large docks needed?

In the mid 19th century, ships were increasing in size, and the first steamers were starting to be used for the transport of goods across the oceans. The volume of trade across the London docks was also expanding rapidly.

The existing docks of St. Katherine Docks, London Docks, West India, South and Millwall Docks and the Commercial Docks in Rotherhithe, were all too small to handle the new ships that London would be expected to support to maintain its position as one of the major ports of the world.

The first of the Royal Docks, the Victoria Dock opened in 1855, and the following report from the same years provides some background:

“NEW VICTORIA DOCKS – To those acquainted with the statistics of the trade of the Port of London, it is notorious that the existing dock accommodation is becoming, year by year, more inadequate to meets its increasing requirements. to supply this want, the Victoria Dock Company purchased a large tract of land in Plaistow Marshes. on the Essex shore of the Thames, below Blackwall.

These magnificent docks were commenced in June 1853, and the works have been unceasingly persevered in. A truly English spirit of ‘business’ appears to have directed the operations of all concerned. It was at one time proposed to open the docks sooner; but on a careful review of all contingencies this plan was not adopted. the spacious basins in connection with their quays and warehouses occupy no less than ninety acres of ground, a space far exceeding that of our East India Docks.

We may remark here, that the marsh, as far as Gallows Reach, was also purchased by the Company, and will be used as occasion requires. The advantage of situation possessed by these docks is sufficiently obvious, and the immediate neighbourhood of several lines of rail, present unusual facilities for communication with town. The Victoria Docks are announced to be opened on Monday next.”

Note that at the time, this whole area was within the County of Essex, and that although it was marsh, the benefit was that there was a very large area of undeveloped land, close to the Thames, and reasonably close to central London.

Around 1930, the Port of London Authority published a wonderful little booklet on the Port of London, covering a “brief survey of its history, with an outline of its present facilities and trade”:

The booklet included the following overview of the combined Royal Docks, and demonstrates the sheer size of the Victoria, Albert and George V docks:

  • Total area (including land for extension): 1,102.5 acres
  • Water area: 246 acres
  • Length of principal entrance: 800 feet
  • Width of principal entrance: 100 feet
  • Depth of principal entrance below T.H.W. at centre of cill: 45 feet
  • Quayage: 12.75 miles

These docks are in reality one huge dock divided into three sections and form the largest sheet of enclosed dock water in the world. They are 40 miles from the sea and only 5 miles by road from the heart of London.

Many vessels belonging to some of the best known Shipping Companies regularly use the Royal Victoria & Albert & King George V. Docks. Frequent cargo and passenger services to all parts of the world are based on these docks and as many as 50 to 60 vessels with a total displacement of about 500,000 tons are sometimes discharging or loading simultaneously in these docks. Vessels bring:-

  • from AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND – enormous quantities of frozen meat, wool , butter, cheese, fruit, wine and grain;
  • from SOUTH AMERICA – chilled beef and frozen meats, dairy produce, grain, wool and coffee;
  • from AFRICA – grain, wool, skins, tobacco, etc.;
  • from NORTH ATLANTIC PORTS – grain, flour, tobacco, and manufactured articles;
  • from BERMUDA – rum, sugar and fruit;
  • from VANCOUVER AND NORTH AMERICA (PACIFIC COASTS) PORTS – grain, timber, fresh fruit and canned fruit and fish;
  • from CHINA AND JAPAN – silk and cotton goods, soya beans, bamboos, canned salmon, hardwoods, hemp seed, cotton seed, vegetable wax, rapeseed oil, peppermint oil, lacquer-ware, porcelain and glassware, tea, rice, carpets, etc.;
  • from INDIA AND THE STRIATS SETTLEMENTS – tea, rubber, spices, canes, rattans, pineapples, mother-of-pearl shells, gums, carpets, cocoa, desiccated coconuts, shellac, tobacco, hemp, jute, gunnies, yarn and hessian cloth.

A couple of things to notice about all the above imports. With a couple of exceptions, they are all either raw materials or food stuffs. There are very few manufactured goods being imported. At the time, Great Britain was still a major manufacturing centre, one of the largest in the world, and was an exporter of manufactured goods to the world, so whilst the country need to import food and raw materials, exports would have been of manufactured goods.

The list also shows how patterns of trade have changed over the last 90 years, as we now import a vast amount of manufactured goods from China and other low cost manufacturing countries in the Far East.

The Port of London Authority booklet included the following image, showing why the Port of London was considered such an important centre of trade, just under 100 years ago:

The drive to develop the Victoria Dock came from a number of those engaged on the development of the railways around London.

George Parker Bidder was an experienced mid 19th century railway engineer who was working on the Eastern Counties Railway running from London to Southend. He had heard of the idea for building a dock on the Plaistow Marshes from a Mr. Blyth who was the manager of the West India Dock Company, who, perhaps surprisingly, took no action on expanding the West India Dock Company to include new docks to the east.

George Bidder joined with Thomas Brassey who was the contractor for the London to Southend railway, and they added another contractor, Samuel Peto, along with Edward Betts, his brother-in-law, and they privately financed a new railway line to run from Stratford to end in a field at North Woolwich.

This railway line was known as “Bidders Folly” after George Parker Bidder, as it seemed to serve no purpose.

As well as the railway, they started buying up land. Much for as little as £7 per acre, however the Dean and Chapter of Westminster owned some 647 acres, and they held out for £250 per acre, having heard that there was the possibility of a new dock being built.

Although the Victoria Dock opened in 1855, it was not until 1858 that it reached it fullest, original extent, and was;

  • 4050 feet in length and included four jetties, 581 feet long and 140 feet wide;
  • There were almost 3 miles of quays;
  • The entrance lock from the Thames was 80 feet wide, 326 feet in length and 28 feet deep.

Building a railway that ended in a field became a major benefit for the new dock, as it provided good transport links with London, and via the Great Northern Railway, gave access to the industrial Midlands towns.

The following extract from the 1927 edition of the Railway Clearing House Official Railway Map of London and its Environs shows the railways around the full Royal Docks complex:

When the docks closed, the railways around the docks became the ready made routes for the Docklands Light Railway, so the “Bidders Folly”, the route of the railway that ended in a field, has continued to serve this part of London to this day.

As well as the railway, the Victoria Dock benefited from the latest hydraulic machinery which operated equipment around the dock, such as cranes, capstans, lifts etc. as well as the lock gates at the entrance to the dock. to give an indication of the savings this type of machinery could provide, the large lock gates could be opened in 1.5 minutes, compared to between 10 and 20 minutes at the other London docks, and with the hydraulically powered capstans, a single man could do the work of up to 40 men, when hauling in a rope from a ship.

All these capabilities put the new Victoria Dock at a considerable advantage to the other London Docks, and as an indication of their immediate success, in April 1858, when the dock was fully operational, 2,500 barges and 508 ships entered the Victoria Dock in a single month.

The following photo from Britain from Above shows the Royal Victoria Dock in 1930. The photo is looking to the west, and we can see the western entrance to the Royal Dock complex to and from the Thames. on the right of the dock are the jetties that extended from the dock edge (source: EPW032928 ENGLAND (1930):

The Victoria Dock had been built using a large amount of debt, and as is so often the case, there was a financial crash which led to further consolidation of the London docks.

A total of £1,076,664 had been borrowed to build the dock, and by 1866 there was still almost £800,000 outstanding on the loan.

The financial houses of London had lent considerable sums to fund the railway building boom from the 1840s, and in 1865 the collapse in the Indian cotton market resulted in many of these financial institutions running short of liquidity.

The bank lending rate was raised to 10%, and a wave of bankruptcies followed, with Samuel Peto, one of the original contractors involved at the start of the Victoria Dock, being one of the first.

Thomas Brassey was left with the liability for the whole of the loan, and being unable to finance the loan, he had to sell the Victoria Dock to the London and St. Katherine Dock Company.

This left all the main docks to the north of the river in the hands of just two companies – the London and St. Katherine Dock Company, and the West India Dock Company, and challenges for the West India Dock Company were about to get worse.

The following photo shows the full Royal Dock complex in 1946, from the east, looking west. In the distance is the Royal Victoria Dock. To the right is the Royal Albert Dock and on the left is the King George V Dock (source: EAW000057 ENGLAND (1946):

By the 1870s, the volume of trade handled by the Victoria Dock had increased considerably, and the size of ship using the London Docks was continuing to increase.

The London and St Katherine Dock Company therefore decided to make use of the land to the east of the Victoria Dock to build a new, large dock complex.

This was the Royal Albert Dock and was opened on the 24th of June, 1880 by the Duke of Connaught.

The lock providing the entrance to a dock was often the limiting factor in the size of ship that could be accommodated. To allow larger ships to use the Royal Albert, the entrance for the new dock was 27 feet deep, compared to 25.5 for the Victoria Dock. The entrance was 550 feet in length and 80 feet wide compared to the Victoria Docks entrance length of 325 feet.

In future expansions of the Royal Albert Dock, a second entrance would be added with a greater depth than the original entrance.

As well as now being the largest of all docks in London, the Royal Albert Dock was also the first dock to use electricity for lighting, and it was planned that work at the dock would be able to continue by night as well as by day.

Another difference with the Royal Albert Dock was in the buildings alongside the dock edge. Rather than storing goods alongside the dock, it was planned that goods would be quickly moved between ship and land, so single storey transit sheds were built to provide a temporary home for goods before they quickly moved on.

Queen Victoria gave permission for the use of the name Albert and for adding “Royal” to both the Victoria and Albert Docks, and whilst the opening of the Victoria Dock seems to have been a quiet affair, the opening of the Royal Albert Dock was a very different matter, as described in the following newspaper report from the time:

“THE ROYAL ALBERT DOCK – The Duke and Duchess of Connaught, as representing the Queen, was to publicly open to-day the Royal Albert Dock, an extension of the London and Victoria Dock Companies’ works at North Woolwich. For the purpose the Royal party will leave the Speaker’s Stairs at half-past eleven in the steamer Victoria, and Mr. George H. Chambers (Chairman of the Company) and other officials will be in attendance. The visitors will be conveyed down the river in fourteen steamers, and upwards of 8,000 persons will be admitted by ticket to witness the ceremony.

At Woolwich the Duke and Duchess and suite will be transferred to the Vestal, which will pass the entrance jetties and enter the lock under a royal salute fired by the 3rd Essex Artillery Volunteers, pass through the basin between the lines of steamers, and the dock under a second royal salute – the bands playing the National Anthem. An address will be presented to the Duke and Duchess of Connaught by the Chairman of the Company, to which the Duke will reply; and he will afterwards name the Victoria Dock, the Royal Victoria Dock, the Victoria Dock extension, the Royal Albert Dock, and the docks as a whole, the Royal Victoria and Albert Docks. A luncheon will follow, and the Royal party will return to and arrive at the Speaker’s Stairs about half-past four.”

And since that opening ceremony, the docks have jointly been know as the Royals.

It must have been quite a sight seeing 14 steamers coming down the river carrying those attending the ceremony. The Duke of Connaught was Arthur, the seventh child and third son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Duchess of Connaught was Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia.

The name Connaught can still be found at the Royal Docks as the road bridge that crosses the docks, between the Victoria and the Albert docks is called Connaught Bridge.

As with the other London Docks, the Royal Docks were continually evolving to support different trade routes, different types of cargo, improved machinery and transport systems, ways of moving cargo between ship and shore, changes in ship design and size etc.

Even during the First World War, upgrades were being made to the docks. New 3 ton electric cranes were installed along with track on the north side of the Albert Dock. An additional 6,000 yards of railway sidings were installed at Victoria Dock.

After the First World War, the importation of large quantities of meat from Australia, New Zealand and South America became a new challenge requiring new buildings at the docks.

A new cold store was built in 1920, which had two, 3 inch layers o cork to keep the interior refrigerated space cold. A second cold store quickly followed at the west end of Albert Dock. This cold store was of two storeys, 1,100 feet long and 123 feet wide. This addition provided four million cubic feet of capacity, and allowed almost a million carcasses of mutton to be stored.

Meat handling facilities were also added to the Royal Victoria Dock. Rather than a cold store, a method of rapidly moving meat from ship to road and rail.

This comprised a dedicated berth for the Royal Mail Line who operated a route between London and South America and imported beef into London. 6,000 feet of mechanical runways were installed, along with automated weighing machines, with the runways transporting beef from ship to insulated rail and road transport, ready for delivery across the country.

Other additions included two large, modern flour mills built on the south side of the Royal Victoria Dock. One for Joseph Rank Ltd. and the other for William Vernon and Sons Ltd. Both mills had warehouses and silos for storing grain.

The flour mills and grain stores can be seen in the upper left cornet of the following photo of the Royal Victoria Dock dated 1937 (source: EPW055308 ENGLAND (1937):

Back to the photos taken by my father on Saturday the 11th of July, 1953, and this was the view along one of the Royal Victoria Dock quaysides. Cranes on rails on the left and transit buildings on the right:

Strangely, there does not seem to be anyone at work in the docks in these photos. It was a Saturday, although I assumed that the docks were 7 days a week operations. It may also be that given the docks were so large, he was in areas where there was no active loading or unloading.

Another view along the quayside:

Lighters are moored in the dock to the left, there is a mechanical grab in the foreground which would have been used to unload raw materials from the hold of a ship. A numbers of barrels, presumably waiting for transport, and note the rail on the right which allowed goods wagons to move along the quayside for movement of goods directly between wagon and ship.

I believe my father was at the dock as part of a visit organised by the St. Bride Photographic Society, then part of the St. Bride Institute next to the church off Fleet Street, as many of the photos are carefully composed for their artistic quality, rather than just documenting the docks. The following is an example, showing the mooring ropes leading up to the bow of a ship:

The following photo is very similar, as it focuses on one of the quayside mooring bollards:

However, the above photo does allow the location to be identified. In the background of the photo there are a number of buildings, and the building on the left has a much taller, small extension projecting above the rest of the building. There is also a ship going in, between the two buildings.

In the following extract from one of the Britain from Above photos, we can see these buildings, with the building with the taller extension standing out (on the left of the oval). The ship that can just be seen in the above photo was in the channel that leads from the main Royal Victoria Dock to the much smaller pontoon dock that can also be seen in the following photo:

So my father’s photo of the mooring bollard was taken from the opposite side of the dock, looking across to the buildings on the other side, next to the entrance to the pontoon dock.

The above image is dated 1946, and you can see that all the jetties that were part of the Royal Victoria Dock (and seen in the earlier 1937 photo), have now ben removed.

These jetties were fairly weak structures, and became difficult to use as ship sizes increased. Goods also needed to be moved along the jetty, between quayside sheds and ship – an inefficient way of operating, so the jetties were removed, and post-war, all ships simply moored alongside the quay.

Cranes – photo 1:

And crane – photo 2:

I do not know if the cranes in the following photo were being built or demolished. I suspect they were being built:

In the earlier photo with the mooring bollard, there was a building in the background with a taller extension to a small part of the roof. In the following photo, my father had walked slightly to the east along the northern side of the Royal Victoria Dock, and in the background we can see the eastern end of this building, between two moored ships:

Bow of a moored ship, with another in the background:

In the following photo, my father had walked to the southern side of the Royal Victoria Dock, and photographed the area in front of the flour mills and grain stores, with the specialised equipment that unloaded grain from moored ships and transferred to the grain stores:

I have highlighted the location of these structures in the following extract from one of the Britain from Above photos, and you can clearly see the two tall structures in front of the grain stores and next to a moored ship:

I assume that these structures used suction to take off the grain from the ship and move to the grain store. Another photo showing more detail:

Not my father’s photos, but a couple of photos that show how goods were handled at the Royal Docks.

The first photo is the interior of a transit shed alongside the Royal Albert Dock:

Whilst the Royal Victoria Dock developed specialised buildings and transport methods for grain, floor and meat, the Royal Albert Dock was a more general dock, handling almost any cargo that needed to be transported to or from a ship.

These cargos were not meant to be stored for long at the dock, rather they were quickly sorted and held in a transit shed, then moved to either road or rail transport for onward delivery across the country.

The above photo shows the transit shed holding a vast quantity of cargo of different types, in boxes, sacks and rolls.

The following photo shows meat being unloaded from a ship to the quayside, where it looks as if it is being put on large trolleys for transfer:

That is a quick look at the Royal Docks, and a slightly more detailed look at the Royal Victoria Dock.

I have not covered the King George V dock yet, and will cover this in a future post, as well as posts covering a walk around the entire perimeter of the Royal Docks today, and through part of Silvertown to explore more history of this very large dock complex, what is left from when the docks were operational, and how the docks have, and continue to change and develop, for example with the London City Airport.

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Negretti & Zambra, Admiral FitzRoy, James Glaisher. From London to Orkney via Greenwich

I have just put up the final dates until next summer for these two walks if you would like to explore these areas with me, using my father’s photos from the late 1940s:

The South Bank – Marsh, Industry, Culture and the Festival of Britain on Sunday 20th of October. Click here to book.

The Lost Streets of the Barbican on Saturday the 2nd of November. Click here to book.

This post was not in my long list of posts to write. It was a chance discovery that resulted in a fascinating set of connections that led back to London. (I am probably guilty of over using the word fascinating, but I really found this one so interesting).

And in a weird coincidence, shortly after, I found a related plaque and tree in London, that I have walked past hundreds of times and never noticed.

The story starts in early September, when we were in Orkney for a few days, the cluster of islands off the north coast of Scotland.

Orkney has long been somewhere we have wanted to visit – Neolithic stone circles, henges and standing stones, a Neolithic village older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, lots of walking and a stunning coast.

We had taken the ferry from Scrabster on the coast of the Scottish mainland, over the Pentland Firth and arrived at Stromness, the second largest town in Orkney.

At this point, London seemed a very distant place, and London and the blog were not on my mind.

Walking along the street that runs the length of the older part of Stromness, we reached a slightly wider open space in front of Stromness Parish Church:

And on the left as you looked at the church there was a large, rectangular white box:

The box held a barometer and thermometer of some age:

And this is where the London connection comes in as the instrument was made by the scientific instrument company of Negretti & Zambra who were based in London.

In 1864 Negretti & Zambra published a little book with the title of “A Treatise on Metrological Instruments”, and the book included details of the type of instrument installed at Stromness in Orkney, as one of their public barometers:

The barometer in Stromness was one of Negretti & Zambra’s Fishery or Sea-coast Barometers, and the book included the following description of the instrument, which is shown to the left of the above page from the book:

“The frame is of solid oak, firmly secured together. The scales are very legibly engraved on porcelain by Negretti and Zambra’s patent process. The thermometer is large, and easily read; and as this instrument is exposed, it will indicate the actual temperature sufficiently for practical purposes.

The barometer tube is three-tenths of an inch in diameter of bore, exhibiting a good column of mercury; and the cistern is of such capacity, in relation to the tube, that the change of height in the surface of the mercury in the cistern corresponding to a change of height of three inches of mercury in the tube, is less than one-hundredth of an inch, and therefore, as the readings are only to be made to this degree of accuracy, this small error is of not importance.

The cistern is made of boxwood, which is sufficiently porous to allow the atmosphere to influence the mercurial column; but the top is plugged with porous cane, to admit of free and certain play.”

Detail of the scale at the top of the column of mercury, which is in the glass tube in the middle:

The scales either side are marked with the height of the mercury column in inches of mercury – the way in which atmospheric pressure was, and still is, measured (although millimeters and millibars are also used instead of inches).

On the left are the forecast weather conditions for the height of mercury if the height of the column of mercury is rising, and on the right are the expected weather conditions for a falling column of mercury.

At the very top of the scale we can see the names of Negretti & Zambra as the manufacturers of the device, and on the right we can see their locations; 1 Hatton Garden, 122 Regent Street and 59 Cornhill, so this is a company with a considerable London heritage.

The top of the scale in more detail is shown below:

The company of Negretti & Zambra was founded in 1850 by Enrico Negretti and Joseph Zambra.

Enrico Negretti (who also used the first name of Henry) was an Italian, born in 1818, and who had emigrated to London at the age of 10. In London, he served an apprenticeship as a glassblower and thermometer maker.

Joseph Zambra was born in Saffron Walden in Essex in 1822, and also had Italian heritage as his father had emigrated from Como. Zambra learnt the skills he would later use in their company as his father was an optician and barometer maker.

Zambra moved from Saffron Walden to London in 1840, living within the Anglo-Italian community which was based around Leather Lane in Holborn, and it was here that he met Negretti, and with complimentary skills, they decided to go into partnership to form the firm of Negretti & Zambra on the 23rd of April, 1850, and operating from 11 Hatton Garden, where they specialised in the manufacture of barometers and thermometers.

Whilst they did make and sell barometers for home use, their reputation came from the design and manufacture of barometers and thermometers with an accuracy, ease of use, and robustness, that could be used in very difficult locations, and for measuring temperature and pressure where they had not been measured before, for example by taking deep sea temperature measurements.

They held a number of patents in both the design and manufacture of instruments, and they were the only English manufacturers to win a medal at the 1851 Great Exhibition and as recorded at the top of the scale on the Orkney barometer, they were appointed opticians and scientific instrument makers to Queen Victoria.

The range of instruments manufactured by the company expanded rapidly, and their 1864 Treatise on Metrological Instruments includes a catalogues of instruments for the home, for portable use , for use up mountains, marine barometers, storm glasses, botanical thermometers, brewers thermometers, instruments to measure humidity, instruments to measure the amount of rainfall, and others to measure steam pressure and to measure pressure in a vacuum.

Their catalogue included a drawing of their three central London locations at Cornhill in the City, Hatton Garden / Holborn Viaduct, and Regent Street:

So the Stromness, Orkney barometer was made in London, but why is it there?

This is where Vice-Admiral FitzRoy, the next name comes into the story.

Robert FitzRoy was born on the 5th of July, 1805 in Ampton, Suffolk and he had a very wide ranging career, being an officer in the Royal Navy, a Governor of New Zealand, and was interested in scientific matters, particularly the weather and the storms that were so dangerous to travelers on the sea.

He was the Captain of HMS Beagle, when Charles Darwin was onboard on their almost five year voyage around the world between 1831 and 1836.

FitzRoy became a member of the Royal Society in 1851, and three years later was appointed as the head of a new organisation within the Board of Trade that was tasked with the collection of weather data from ships at sea and coastal ports. This would evolve into what we know today at the Met Office.

Weather data was important, as in the middle of the 19th century there was no systematic method of weather data collection from across the country and also no weather forecasting.

Whilst this was a relatively small problem for those on land, it could often be a matter of life and death for those at sea, and there were numerous ship wrecks and deaths as a result of storms that hit without any warning.

An example from 1858 in the Inverness Chronicle covering the waters around Orkney shows the impact:

“MELANCHOLY LOSS OF SIX MEN – Early last month the herring-fishing boat Margaret, of Tonque, in the parish of Lewis, after prosecuting the herring fishing here, left for home, in company with hundreds of others, which were overtaken by a heavy gale of north-easterly wind soon after passing through the Pentland Firth. the boats fled in all directions, where there was the shadow of a chance of shelter.

Many reached the lochs of the west coast of Sutherland; one reached Skaill Bay, in Orkney; one crew was picked up by an American vessel and landed here, their boat being subsequently found and taken to Stornoway. meanwhile, intelligence of the safe arrival of the Lewis crews, with the exception of that referred to, has reached; and the appearance of a portion of the wreck of their boat, driven ashore at Birsay, in Orkney, leaves no room to doubt their sad fate.

When last seen the boat was about ten miles off Cape Wreath, making for the Minch of Lews, on the evening of Friday the 10th, when other boats in their company was parted from them by the violence of the storm.”

FitzRoy wanted to make weather information, including some indication of the forecast weather, available for fishermen, such as those in the above article, and for shipping in general.

His scheme was to distribute barometers to fishing communities and coastal villages around the country, and Negretti and Zambra were responsible for the manufacture of the barometers.

According to the Treatise on Metrological Instruments by Negretti and Zambia, FitzRoy was responsible for the wording on the barometer scale, with the predictions for weather based on whether the column of mercury was rising or falling and the height of the column. Fitzroy’s wording can be seen on the Orkney barometer.

Barometers were loaned free of charge to poor fishing communities, or were funded by a wealthy local, or through voluntary donations. This last method was used for the barometer in Orkney, which is recorded at the very top of the instrument, which can just be seen in one of the photos earlier in the post.

The barometer was sent from London to Orkney on the 27th of October 1869, and it was number 98 in the chain of barometers around the coast. The first barometers in the network seem to have been sent to their coastal location in early 1861, and the network expanded rapidly over the coming years.

The arrival of the barometer was recorded in the Orcadian newspaper on the 20th of November 1869:

“BAROMETER – The barometer, which we mentioned last week was to be sent here for the guidance of fishermen and others, has arrived; but as yet no suitable site has been obtained for its erection. The barometer is the gift of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and was consigned to their honorary secretary here – Mr. James R. Garriock – in whose shop window it is now on view. A register of its indications is, we understand, to be kept, and will be exhibited alongside the instrument. In front of the barometer is a thermometer.”

The Stromness, Orkney barometer was installed a couple of years after FitzRoy’s death, but became part of FitzRoy’s initial barometer network, where readings of the barometer were telegraphed back to Fitzroy’s Meteorological Office in London, where the collection of data was used to put out rudimentary weather forecasts.

These first forecasts were very basic, for example the following is from the Yorkshire Gazette on the 13th of February, 1864 – one of the first forecasts sent out from London:

“WEATHER FORECAST – Admiral Fitzroy telegraphs that a gale may be expected, most probably from the southward.”

A very simple, but very valuable forecast if you were a fisherman.

In the 1860s, problems within the Meteorological Office, and the many challenges with other organisations and users of the forecasting service (for example as the forecast came from the Met Office which was part of the Board of Trade, a Government department, it was seen to be an official pronouncement and therefore subject to far more criticism and challenge than a local forecast). FitzRoy also had financial problems and suffered from depression.

Possibly due to all these pressures, Robert FitzRoy took his own life on the 30th of April, 1865.

There were many, long obituaries in the newspapers of the time, with the following being typical of the first few sentences:

“ADMIRAL FITZROY – The public have lost a valuable servant and humanity a friend, unwearied in his efforts to save life, in the death of Admiral Robert FitzRoy, the head of the Meteorological department of the Board of Trade, who committed suicide on Sunday morning. The sad event took place at Lyndhurst House, Norwood, Surrey. The unfortunate gentleman had been for several days in a very low state; but nothing in particular was apprehended by his fronds, who considered the marked change in his manners owing to over study, and this, no doubt, has been the cause of the catastrophe.”

Robert Fitzroy’s legacy was the Met Office, that is still responsible for providing weather forecasts today, along with the few remaining barometers he designed and were installed in fishing and coastal villages around the British Isles, such as the one in Stromness, Orkney.

Negretti and Zambra continued to capitalise on their relationship with Robert FitzRoy, and the barometers that they had produced for him, after his death.

Thomas Babington took over the Meteorological Office after FitzRoy’s death, and wrote to Negretti and Zambra, complaining that their advertising was implying that all barometers used by Fitzroy were made by Negretti and Zambra and that they were using the “absurd title of storm barometer”, which implied that their barometers had an ability to predict storms.

Babington’s letter does not seem to have changed Negretti and Zambra’s marketing strategy, as they continued advertising in much the same way as before.

Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy:

There is one other name I need to track down, along with the connection to Greenwich.

On the body of the Stromness barometer is the following label:

The statement that the barometer reads correctly with Greenwich Standard was signed by James Glaister, F.R.S.

Firstly why Greenwich?

If you were distributing a network of barometers around the country and receiving their readings centrally in London, and making forecasts based on these readings, it was essential that you could trust the reading from each barometer, and that they were correctly calibrated, so that if they were all in the same place, they would all have the same reading.

This is where Greenwich came in to the process. the Royal Observatory at Greenwich is well known for its astronomical work, but the institution was also responsible for many other scientific activities, and one of the departments at the Royal Observatory was the Department of Meteorology and Magnetism, and James Glaister was the Superintendent of this department for 34 years, including the period when the barometers were being dispatched across the country.

I assume the process must have been that they were manufactured by Negretti & Sambra in central London, then sent to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where they were calibrated and checked against a standard barometer reading at the observatory.

The label with James Glaisher’s signature was then attached, and the barometer shipped to the coastal location where it was to be installed.

James Glaisher was a fascinating character. Born in Rotherhithe on the 7th of April 1809, the son of a watchmaker which probably contributed to his interest in scientific instruments.

The family moved from Rotherhithe to Greenwich, and Glaisher’s first experience of the Royal Observatory came from a visit when he was aged 20.

His first job was working on the principal triangulation of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland. This was the process of measuring distances and heights, essential to producing accurate maps.

After this he worked at the Cambridge University observatory, under Professor George Airy, who would become Astronomer Royal at Greenwich in June 1835, and Airy bought Glaisher from Cambridge to Greenwich and the two continued to work together.

In 1838 Airy put Glaisher in charge of the new magnetic and meteorological department which Airy had established at Greenwich, and he would work in this role for almost 40 years. One part of his new role was making and managing the recording of meteorological observations, and he was also responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the instruments used, and by 1850 he was the recognized authority in the country for the verification of meteorological instruments, which is why his name is on the barometer in Stromness, Orkney.

He was one of the founders of the British Meteorological Society, and was elected as the society’s first secretary.

James Glaisher:

James Glaisher by Samuel Alexander Walker. albumen carte-de-visite, 1860s
NPG x22544© National Portrait Gallery, London

Although Glaisher’s work at the Greenwich Royal Observatory was important, and contributed considerably to the measurement and observations of the weather, and in the type and accuracy of the instruments used, to the general public he was best known for his ballooning exploits. These were carried out under the auspices of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with the intention of making observations and measurements at high altitudes.

The following is a report from the 18th of April, 1902 on James Glaisher’s 93rd birthday, and covers his ballooning exploits in some hair raising detail:

“SEVEN MILES IN THE AIR – NONAGENARIAN BALLOONIST’S REMARKABLE RECORD. Mr. James Glaisher, F.R.A.S, who made the highest balloon ascent ever recorded, has just celebrated his 93rd anniversary of his birthday. Mr. Glaisher will be remembered by the world’s scientists as the father of meteorology in England. He founded the Royal Meteorological Society in 1850, and from 1841 until the present time has supplied the quarterly and annual meteorological reports published by the Registrar-General. Now he thinks it is time he handed over the task to another. It was on September 5, 1862 that Mr. Glaisher, accompanied by Mr. Coxwell, a dentist and aeronaut, made the most famous of his balloon ascents.

‘I was a married man’ he said in the course of a conversation the other day, ‘and I did not think a married man ought to go ballooning, but I found that I must go up myself if I wanted observations properly taken, so I took to ballooning and made 29 ascents.

The September ascent was from Wolverhampton. The balloon soared up above the clouds and Mr. Glaisher, as was his custom, kept his eyes on his instruments and his notebooks until he recorded a height of 28,000ft. Then he found that he had lost the use of his limbs, and he saw Mr. Coxwell climb up to the ring and try to seize the valve rope, but Mr. Coxwell’s hands were so benumbed that he could not use them. He seized the valve-rope in his teeth and thus tugged the valve open.

Meanwhile Mr. Glaisher had fallen unconscious, with his head over the side of the car. He was unconscious for 13 minutes, and when he recovered, the balloon, which had been going up at a rate of 1000ft a minute, was descending at the rate of 2000ft a minute. During the interval it is calculated that the balloon rose to a height of over seven miles.

Another of Mr. Glaisher’s adventures happened at Newhaven. While he and Mr. Coxwell were high up the clouds parted, and they found themselves all but over the sea. Mr. Coxwell hung on to the valve-rope so long that the balloon lost all its gas, and fell two or three thousand feet to the earth. The car and the instruments were smashed, but the balloonists escaped with slight injuries.”

The wonderfully described “Mr. Coxwell, a dentist and aeronaut” was Henry Coxwell, who, as well as being a dentist was a professional balloonist and Glaisher partnered with Coxwell so he could takes scientific measurements during the ascent which Coxwell controlled.

Coxwell made a number of ascents across London, many for show, including from Cremorne Gardens (Chelsea), Woolwich and Mile End Road.

The Wolverhampton ascent is remarkable. Most commercial jet airliners will travel at somewhere between 5.5 and 7 miles at their cruising altitude. Just imagine looking out of an airliner’s windows at that height and seeing two Victorian balloonists in their wicker basket.

James Glaisher and Henry Coxwell illustrated in their balloon:

James Glaisher; Henry Tracey Coxwell by Negretti & Zambra albumen carte-de-visite, late 1862 3 1/2 in. x 2 1/2 in. (90 mm x 62 mm)
Given by John Herbert Dudley Ryder, 5th Earl of Harrowby, 1957
Photographs Collection NPG x22561

Surprisingly, both Glaisher and Coxwell both lived a long life, and both died peacefully, rather than in a balloonoing accident. James Glaisher lived to the age of 93 and Henry Coxwell reached the age of 80.

The 2019 film The Aeronauts was based on Glaisher and Coxwell’s highest ascent, with Eddie Redmayne playing James Glaisher, however Henry Coxwell was completely left out of the film, with the character of the balloon’s pilot being Amelia Wren, played by Felicity Jones.

The Great Storm of 1987

Robert Fitzroy founded the Met Office in 1854, and began the process of gradually producing more and more accurate weather forecasts.

By a rather strange coincidence, soon after returning from Scotland, I was walking past Charing Cross Station, somewhere I have walked hundreds of times, and noticed for the first time, a couple of plaques on one of the pillars outside the station which record one of the most dramatic weather events for a very long time. They also remind us how over 100 years after the founding of the Met Office, forecasting was still difficult:

The top plaque records the “Great Storm” that struck south east England in the early hours of Friday the 16th of October 1987, and that in “four violent hours London lost 250,000 trees”:

I well remember that storm. I got home late that evening after a leaving do for a work colleague at, if I remember rightly, the Punch & Judy in Covent Garden, and it seemed to be getting very windy.

Overnight, the chimney on our house came apart, brick by brick, but luckily no further structural damage.

After the storm, Angus McGill of the Evening Standard launched an appeal to replace many of London’s lost trees (McGill is commemorated on the lower plaque), and the oak tree at the eastern edge of the station boundary is one of the trees planted as a result of the appeal.

The tree is in the photograph below, and the two plaques are on the left hand pillar behind the tree:

Well over 100 years after Fitzroy founded the Meteorological Office, in 1987, forecasting the weather was still a challenge, and Michael Fish’s forecast on the Thursday before the storm has become somewhat infamous as an example of getting a forecast wrong (in reality, high winds were forecast, but the storm tracked slightly further to the north and was a deeper low than had been forecast):

The Orkney Islands

The Orkney Islands are really rich in history and natural landscapes. Probably best known for Scapa Flow, the large, sheltered body of water between the islands, where the German Navy High Seas Fleet was scuttled in the First World War, and used by the British Navy of the First and Second World Wars as a Naval Base, there is much else to discover.

Some examples;

The Italian Chapel

We left Kirkwall in bright sunshine and after a short drive to the chapel found ourselves in thick fog.

The Italian Chapel was built by Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War, who were based on the main Orkney island, and were used to build the causeways between the main island and South Ronaldsway.

The chapel was mainly built and decorated using concrete, one of the few available materials at the time, and is really remarkable:

The Standing Stones of Stenness:

Four upright stones of an original twelve, that date back over 5,000 years.

Ring of Brodgar:

A 5,000 year old stone circle, originally of 60 stones, with 36 surviving today, and at least 13 prehistoric burial mounds.

Skara Brae Prehistoric Village:

A remarkable, 5,000 year old Neolithic settlement, first uncovered by a storm in 1850 when part of the site was revealed when some of the sand dunes that had been covering the settlement for centuries were blown away.

A number of the individual houses still have some of their stone furniture in place.

Brough of Birsay:

A tidal island, reached when the tides are right, across a causeway. The island has Pictish, Norse and Medieval remains.

Leaving Stromness (where the barometer is located), on the ferry to the Scottish mainland:

The Stromness barometer is number 98 of around 100 barometers installed around the coast by Robert FitzRoy’s project. It continued to be read until 2005, and was restored in 2014 using funding from the Townscape Heritage Initiative.

Stromness library includes a book about FitzRoy and his barometers, as well as the operators manual for the barometer.

Whilst the barometer aims to forecast the weather, it also tells a fascinating story of the mid-19th century, with Negretti and Zambra being London’s foremost scientific instrument makers. Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy founding the Met office, as part of the Board of Trade, and James Glaisher, who ran the Meteorological and Magnetic Department of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and who was a daring balloonist in his quest to measure temperature, pressure etc. of the atmousphere.

I know I overuse the word, but this is a really fascinating story, of which I have just scratched the surface.

alondoninheritance.com

Bluecoat School, Caxton Street, Westminster

Two tickets have just become available for my walk “Limehouse – A Sink of Iniquity and Degradation”, this coming Sunday, the 6th of October. Click here for details and booking.

The following photo is from 1984 and shows one of the many Blue Coat figures which can be seen on surviving charity school buildings from the late 17th and 18th centuries across London:

Forty years later, the statue is still there, looking good and has obviously been restored since the 1984 photo:

The figure is on the building that was once a Bluecoat School in Caxton Street, Westminster, and as recorded on the plaque in the above photo, the building dates from 1709.

The figure in the above two photos is on the front of the building, however most first views of the old school are probably of the rear and side of the building, seen as you walk along Buckingham Gate. I was walking from Victoria Street along Buckingham Gate, so this was my first view of the building:

Although the surroundings have changed beyond all recognition, the building itself has hardly changed, as can be seen in the following print of the rear of the school, from 1850:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

In the above print, the school appears to have had railings and a wall surrounding its boundary, and also had a grassed area to the rear – possibly a small open space for the children of the school. Today, this is paved over:

The plaque on the first two photos of the front of the school dates the building to 1709, however the school was founded 21 years earlier in 1688 at the expense of “Divers well disposed persons Inhabitants of ye Parish of St. Margaret Westminster”.

The aim of the school was to teach the children of the poor the doctrines of the Church of England, and enable them to move on to an apprenticeship, or to gain an occupation.

As well as a limited form of education, children at the school were also given some degree of medical care, as in 1835, in a listing of physicians at the Royal Metropolitan Infirmary for Sick Children in Broad Street, Golden Square, a Mr. George S. Lilburn, M.D. was also listed as a “Physician to the Bluecoat School, Westminster”.

The school must have been successful in its first 21 years as the new school building was constructed in 1709 on land leased from the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey, and funded by William Greene, a local brewer who paid for the school..

The interior of the building was simple, with a single school room above a basement. the exterior of the building was off brick, and was described as being of in a similar style to William Greene’s brewery.

Attendance at the school was initially for 20 boys who would be educated and clothed for free. The clothing was of the style shown on the figures around the building. As well as being the children of the poor, the parents or grandparents of the children would also have had to have lived in the parish of St. Margaret’s or St. John’s for at least a year.

A girls school appears to have been added not long after the new boys school was completed, as donations were being raised for a girls school of 20 pupils between 1713 and 1714.

Nothing today exists of the girls school, however recent research suggests that the girls school was located on the western side of the paved area at the rear of the boys school.

There were other buildings associated with the school that have been lost, including a headmaster’s house, so the single building we see today was part of a cluster of buildings forming a school for boys and girls.

The school was founded in 1688, and whilst this is just a date on a stone block on the school building, it is interesting to consider the state of the country when the school was founded, as both the charity and building did not exist in isolation. They were partly in response to what was happening in the country at the time.

The school was founded not long after the English Civil War (1642 to 1648), execution of Charles I (1649), the Commonwealth (1649 to 1660), restoration of the Monarchy with Charles II (1660), the Great Fire of London (1666), the reign of William and Mary (William III, 1689 to 1702), to prevent a Catholic succession after the death of James II, so the preceding 46 years had been one of considerable change, and the school was founded in the same year that James II’s wife, Mary of Moderna, gave birth to a son, James Francis Edward Stuart, who was next in line to the throne and would perpetuate a pro-Catholic approach by the English Crown.

The following is from the London Sun on Saturday the 29th of June, 1844, and announces a meeting where the audience will be asked for funds to support the Blue Coat school charity, and the article also provides some background as to the worries in the country when the school was founded, and concerns about the religious education of the young at such as time:

“BLUE-COAT SCHOOL, WESTMINSTER – The Rev. Dr. Colls will advocate the claims of the charity next Sunday morning at St. Peter’s Episcopal Chapel, Queen-square, St. James’s Park, in compliance with the particular request of a large body of Governors of that institution.

It may not, perhaps, be generally known that the Westminster Blue-coat School was the first of the kind in England, having been founded in the year 1688. a few months previous to the landing of King William, while this country was in a ferment at the impending danger to the Church and Constitution.

A few persons, grieved at the state of ignorance and irreligion in which the rising generation were then growing up, determined to make an effort to ground them thoroughly in the doctrines and the duties of the Christian religion, considering that this was the only effectual way to preserve the young from the sophistry of the infidel and the contamination of the profane.

In the choice of their advocate on the present occasion, the Governors of the charity have been fortunate, since the Rev. Dr. Colls is himself a practical example of the benefit and the blessing of early religious principles; and we hope he will be successful in opening the hands and hearts of his audience next Sunday morning in favour of the excellent charity.”

The plaque on the school building recording the original founding date of the school, one year before William and Mary landed from the Netherlands, and the “Glorious Revolution”:

The location of the church can be seen in the following map. the front of the school faces onto Caxton Street which has long been the official address of the school, and the western side is next to Buckingham Gate, with Victoria Street running left to right across the centre of the map  (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Roughly 35 years after the new school building was constructed, Rocque’s map of 1746 shows the school (within the red circle), facing onto Chapel Street (the old name for Caxton Street), and alongside Horse Ferry Road (the old name for Buckingham Gate). Victoria Street will cut across the map in the mid 19th century:

What is interesting about the above map is the number of charity schools in the area, each with their own different coloured coat. I have marked the Green Coat School with the green circle and the Gray Coat School in the orange circle (a grey circle did not stand out well on the map).

The blue colour for the coats of the Blue Coast School seems to have been in use by 1700, when the uniform for the school was decided, and blue was chosen as “the most convenient colour would be Blew, being different from the other schools in the parish”.

When children went to, or left the charity schools in this small area, it must have been a scene of some colour with blue, green and grey coats being worn on the streets.

Also on the map, to the right of the Blue Coat School there is St. Margaret’s Burying Ground, showing an open space with a small chapel. The reference to the original founding of the school quoted earlier in the post states is was through “Divers well disposed persons Inhabitants of ye Parish of St. Margaret Westminster“.

St. Margaret’s was (and still is) the smaller church that is within the grounds of Westminster Abbey, in the north east corner, next to Parliament Square. The burying ground shown on the map was St. Margaret’s extra space for burials.

Part of this burying ground can still be found, the small, open space alongside Victoria Street, now known as Christchurch Gardens, which occupies roughly the middle third of the original burying grounds. The lower third is under Victoria Street and the upper third long built over. The remains of the burying ground today:

There were a number of Blue Coat Schools across London, and there seems to have been some competition, or confusion as to which school was founded first.

The following letter is from the Morning Herald on the 27th of July, 1830, and is in response to a previous comment about the schools of St. Botolph, Aldgate being older than the school facing Caxton Street::

“Sir, – In the Morning Herald of yesterday I observed a notice of a sermon for the charity schools of St. Botolph, Aldgate, it was appended a statement that these schools were the earliest of the kind instigated.

I should be extremely sorry to say one word which might be injurious to so excellent an institution, but justice to another admirable establishment compels me to deny the truth of the statement that the first charity school was established at St. Botolph.

The Blue-Coat School, Westminster, is beyond doubt the earliest of these institutions, having been established in the year 1688. Having been lately called upon to preach for that excellent charity I was led to investigate the matter, and obtained the following results:- The Blue Coat, Westminster, was established in 1688; a school in Norton Folgate in 1691, and that of St. Botolph, Aldgate, in 1697. In 1704 the number of schools had so increased that a general meeting of the children was held in St. Andrew’s Church, the number being about 2,000; the sermon was preached by Dr. Weller, Dean of Lincoln.

In 1716 the number of schools in London and Westminster was 124; the number of children 4,896; the entire number of schools in Great Britain and Ireland was1,239; the number of children 24,941; the greater part established within about 20 years.

To several of the early printed reports is attached the following note, (I copy from the sermon and report for 1716):- ‘All schools above mentioned have been set-up since 1697, except that belonging to the New Church in St. Margaret, Westminster, by the name of the Blue Coat School, which was set up Lady-day, 1688, for 50 boys, and the school of Norton-Folgate, erected in 1691, for 60 boys’.

I conclude with repeating that I have no wish to detract from the merits of St. Botolph’s school, but its friends have no right to claim for it that honour which so clearly belongs to another. I am, sir, your obedient servant, Thos. Stone, M.A. Assit. Curate St. john the Evangelist, Westminster.”

Whilst the Blue Coast School in Westminster may have been the first of this type of charity school, the problem with being a charity school was the constant need to raise funds, and the frequent shortage of sufficient funding to provide all the services that were intended by the trustees.

The following article from the Westminster and Chelsea News on the 28th of January, 1882 shows both one of the benefits of attending the school and the impact of a lack of funding (also note the use of Blew rather than Blue which seems to have been used a number of times):

“THE ‘BLEW COAT SCHOOL, WESTMINSTER. The annual dinner to the children of the ‘Blew’ Coat School, Westminster, the gift of John Lettsom Elliot, a former treasurer of the Charity, took place on the 20th inst. in the large school room, where the children were plentifully supplied with roast beef and plum pudding. This old and very useful Westminster Charity is, we are sorry to hear, sadly in need of support, the Governors being compelled to reduce the benefits in consequence, and singular to state this is the only ‘free’ school in Westminster, all the others having been closed. Mr. James Sarsons, the head master, conducted everything in his usual kind manner.”

The article highlights the precariousness of providing a service through a charity, in that the charity will always be after new funding, and that being dependent on charity funding, the services provided can only match the money available.

The article also states that the Blue Coast School was the only free school available in Westminster, so the other schools shown in Rocque’s map must have closed.

I have got this far in the post, and I have not yet shown the front of the school, so here is the building as it faces onto Caxton Street, with the blue coated figure shown in the photos at the start of the post:

The location of parked cars and a delivery lorry in the road opposite the school made it a bit difficult to photograph, but it is a lovely building and very different to the school’s surroundings.

The article above from 1882 was getting towards the end of the school’s history as a charity school as the provision of education was changing in the late 19th century, with the provision of free education for all children and the creation of the London School Board, which was responsible for many of the wonderful large brick late 19th century schools we can still see across London.

The location of the school was also suffering with the constant development of the area, for example with the construction of the District Line which resulted in the loss of part of the school’s land and buildings.

In 1898 the Governors of the school requested and received authorisation to close the school and transfer the land and building to the Vestry of St. Margaret and St. John, Westminster, who then transferred the school to the Christchurch National Schools, as part of the national church school system. The school then became the Infants department of Christchurch School, and attached to the church which has since been demolished, and which stood on the corner of Caxton Street and Broadway.

During the Second World War, the school was used by the Forces, after the war for community use such as the Girl Guides and as a Youth Club, as well as continuing use as an infant school until 1954.

The building was purchased by the National Trust in 1954, and was then restored and opened to the public.

Further restoration work was needed in 1974, when the Trust also installed offices in the basement.

The National Trust closed their shop along with public access to the old Blue Coat School building in 2013, when it then became a showroom for bridal wear designer Ian Stewart.

The building is Grade I listed. I am not sure if the building is still owned by the National Trust. The Historic England official list entry for the building does have National Trust in brackets after the name of the building, however the date of the most recent amendment is 1987, when the building was an open, National Trust property.

In the National Trust Heritage Records Online record for the building, the Most Recent Monitoring section has “None Recorded”, which implies that it is not a National Trust property as I assume they would be monitoring the building.

The building is now occupied by Studio Ashby, who appear to be residential and commercial interior designers, and on their website they state that they have “become the next custodians of this magical and historic site”, which implies the building is now privately owned.

From photos on Studio Ashby’s website, the interior still includes the following features from the Historic England listing “Fine interior forming single tall space with pilasters and niches to walls, entablature and coved ceiling; four fluted Corinthian columns mark entrance; fireplace to opposite end” – although the fireplace is not visible, and the whole of the interior is painted white.

The building’s Grade I listing should help preserve the building into the future, and it is good to see the statue and plaque on the front looking better today than they were in 1984.

The Blue Coat School in Caxton Street is an important reminder of the development of education in London, and how the aim of these charities was to give the children of the poor a religious education, along with gaining the skills needed to get an apprenticeship, or to work.

A wonderful survivor given how much this area has changed, and continues to change.

alondoninheritance.com

Soho Pubs – Part 2

Tickets for my final Southbank walk until next summer: The South Bank – Marsh, Industry, Culture and the Festival of Britain, on the 20th of October, are now available by clicking here.

I am back in Soho for this week’s post, continuing my exploration of Soho pubs, including one that claims to be “the West End’s best known pub”, and that “it’s a deeply loved London institution with a rich history”.

The pub with these claims will be later in the post, and is one of many fascinating and individual pubs to be found across part of London which, along with the City, has the highest density of pubs, and where drinking has been embedded in the culture of the place.

Today’s tour starts with:

The Crown and Two Chairmen – Dean Street

The Crown and Two Chairmen is one of the more unusual London pub names. The building we see today dates from 1929, however there has been a pub on the site since 1736 when it was called just the Crown.

The story about the change of name to the Crown and Two Chairmen is that two sedan chair men who were taking Queen Anne to have her portrait painted by Sir James Thornhill, who apparently had his studio in the area, would call at the pub for a drink.

One of the places where this story was put forward was an article in the Sporting Life on the 3rd of November 1926 on historic pubs, where the following was written about the Crown and Two Chairmen, as one of the oldest-established hostelries in the West End:

“It is the only inn of the name in London, and is said to derive its title from the fact that the bearers of Queen Anne’s chair were wont to beguile their time there while Her Majesty was sitting for her portrait to Sir James Thornhill, who lived in the house opposite. This house, No. 74, is still standing next door to the Royalty Theatre.

The Crown and Two Chairmen is probably the tavern mentioned by George Augustus Sala as the one in which he first saw Thackeray. The house was kept by one Dick Moreland, supposed to have been the last landlord in London to wear a pigtail and top-boots, and a small club was held upstairs.”

The problem with this story is that Queen Anne died in 1714, twenty two years before the original pub seems to have been built. The change in name was probably to separate the pub from another pub with the same original name, the Crown in Brewer Street.

I cannot find exactly when the pub changed name, the earliest reference I can find is from August 1811, when the landlord of the pub was unwittingly involved with handling a stolen £10 note. In this reference, the pub had the name of Crown and Two Chairmen.

Whether or not the Queen Anne reference is correct, the pub has one of the more unusual names in London.

The Dog and Duck – Bateman Street

So many London pubs are on the corner of two streets. This makes sense as a corner location stands out far more than within a terrace. Potential customers walking along multiple streets can see the pub, however it does cause confusion with the address of a pub. What street should apply?

Taking the Dog and Duck, the longest side of the building, with three upper floor window bays is on Bateman Street, and this is the street used in the address of the pub, however, searching for references to the pub, Frith Street is used just as many times as Bateman Street, and Frith Street has by far the shortest side of the pub, with just a single window bay.

As an example, the building is Grade II listed, and in the Historic England listing, Bateman Street is given as the address of the pub in the header to the entry, however Frith Street is used in the entry detail.

The listing states that that Dog and Duck was built in 1897, and designed by Francis Chambers for the Cannon Brewery. The interior of the pub is “an exceptional survival of a small late Victorian pub interior with tile work, mirrors and high-quality joinery”.

Although the current pub building dates from 1897, it was built on the site of an early 18th century pub with the same name. The earliest reference I can find to the pub dates from the 17th of July, 1752, and reads: “On Tuesday, about Five o’clock in the afternoon, as Lieutenant-Colonel Demarr, of Col. Holmes’s late Regiment of Marines was going along Thrift Street, Soho, he was suddenly taken ill, and went into the Dog and Duck Alehouse, where a Surgeon was sent for to bleed him, but to no purpose, for he expired in a short time.”

The spelling of the street as Thrift Street in the above article must have been an error, as the name Frith Street appears on maps in the 17th century and onwards.

In 2003, newspapers were reporting that the pop star Madonna was a visitor to the Dog and Duck, and that “The ‘Material Girl’ told how she had developed a taste for Landlord at the Dog and Duck in London’s Soho, where it has been sold for about 10 years. her revelation on Jonathan Ross’s BBC talk show has caused a flurry of media activity and now the Campaign for Real Ale are claiming bitter is back in Vogue”.

A nice touch with exterior decoration to the pub is that on the corner of the pub, where there should be a window on the third floor is the following relief showing a dog with a duck in its mouth:

The French House – Dean Street

The pub has had the formal name of the French House for a relatively short period of time, it was originally called the York Minster.

Another example of being careful with sources, Wikipedia states that the “pub was opened by a German national named Christian Schmitt in 1891 and traded as York Minster”, however there are plenty of newspaper reports that mention the pub, going back several decades in the 19th century, with the earliest I could find being from 1837 when a horse trotting challenge was being advertised and that the challenge could be backed at the York Minster, Dean Street, Soho.

The French theme to the pub has been around for some time, in parallel to being called the York Minster.

Although an early landlord was a German national, the pub was for long managed by a Belgian national, one Victor Berlemont, who had a son, Gaston Berlemont who was born in the pub in 1914.

Gaston was a British national, who lived in Soho, and served in the RAF, and became the landlord of the York Minister when his father died in 1951. He continued as landlord until retirement, rather appropriately on Bastille Day in 1989.

The pub was popular with the Free French forces during the Second World War and later Gaston promoted a Gallic image for the pub, and long before the change of name, it became known as “The French”.

There are two films of Gaston’s retirement on the 14th of July 1989 on YouTube. Part 1 is here (if received via email, you will need to go to the post on the website here to view):

And part 2 is here:

As can be seen in the above two films, the name of the pub in 1989 was the French House, and the name change had taken place 5 years earlier in 1984 after the fire at the real York Minster, when apparently donations for the repair of the church in York were being received at the pub in Soho, which Gaston did forward to York (and there is a story that wine destined for the pub in Soho reached the real York Minster in York).

The change in name was really just a formality for the pub due to its decades long association with a French influence. For example, in The Tatler on the 28th of January, 1953, the pub was described as follows: “York Minster, Dean Street, opposite bombed St. Anne’s. Upstairs in the small pub there is excellent, plain French cooking to be had most days. It is lucky if you happen to like one of the plats du jour, for they are one of the best bets. You can have wine by the glass and those who favour the drink can watch absinthe dripping into their glass on the zinc downstairs. There is nothing very French-looking about the York Minster (nothing except the period, to remind you of the Toulouse-Lautrec film), but most of the clientele is Soho-French. So is the patron.”

The French influence continues to this day, with the French flags on the front of the pub, and with the menu at the first floor restaurant.

Admiral Duncan – Old Compton Street

The Admiral Duncan in Old Compton Street, known as Soho’s oldest gay pub, was the scene of a bomb attack in 1999, when it was the third London site attacked by the so called at the time “London Nail Bomber”.

Although no one had died in the previous two attacks, the bomb at the Admiral Duncan killed three,. When the attacker was sent for trial, newspapers summarized the accusations: “A 23 year old engineer accused of murdering three people in London nail bombings was committed for trial yesterday at the Old Bailey. **********, of Cove, Hampshire, is accused of murdering Andrea Dykes, John Light and Nicholas Moore in a bomb blast at the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, central London, on April 30th. He is also accused of three counts of causing an explosion relating to the bombing at Electric Avenue, Brixton, south London, on April 17th, a bombing in the Brick Lane, east London the following Saturday and at Soho on April 30th.”

He should have been charged with four murders as Andrea Dykes was pregnant.

The choice of bomb locations, where minority and vulnerable people were targets gives some indication of the attacker’s motivations as a neo-Nazi, who used bombs packed with nails, designed to cause maximum harm to anyone in the vicinity of the explosion, and many of the 139 injured in the three attacks had horrific injuries.

He told police that he “wanted to be an infamous murderer who started a race war”.

The above newspaper report included his name, however I have deleted it, as people who do this should not have their names remembered (as was his intention), rather they should be consigned to oblivion. He was given 6 life sentences, and hopefully should never be released, although he is eligible for parole in his seventies.

The Admiral Duncan pub seems to date from the early decades of the 19th century, I suspect it was 1826 as the Admiral Duncan was advertising for staff, for example with the following advert from the Morning Advertiser on Thursday 15th of June, 1826: “WANTED in a Public-House a SERVANT of ALL-WORK. A young Woman of good character may apply at the Admiral Duncan, Old Compton-street, Soho.”

The bomb attacks were the result of an individuals hatred and discrimination of other communities, and the above advert of staff in 1826 ended with another example, as it ended with “No Irish person need apply”.

A couple of month later, the Admiral Duncan was advertising for “a SERVANT of ALL-WORK – A young English WOMAN of good character”.

I do not know if this was specific to the landlord of the Admiral Duncan in 1826, as you do not see this type of discrimination that often in adverts for pub staff in the early 19th century.

The pub is named after Admiral Adam Duncan, who was the Admiral in charge of the Royal Navy fleet that defeated the Dutch fleet in the battle of Camperdown (or Camperduin, the Dutch name of the town on the coast of the Netherlands) off where the battle was fought.

The battle was a significant victory, and is ranked as one of the most important actions in the history of the Royal Navy.

Duncan was made a Viscount and received an annual pension of £3,000 as a reward for his success, and there seems to have been a number of pubs given the name of the Admiral Duncan in the first half of the 19th century.

Comptons – Old Compton Street

Comptons in Old Compton Street is another Soho LBGTQ pub, however the current name is relatively recent.

It started out as the Swiss Hotel a private hotel that seems to have catered for the Swiss community as in 1874 is was advertising for “a young Swiss”, who also speaks English. Whether having Swiss staff was to support a Swiss customer base, or as a novelty for English customers is not clear.

It could be the former as a year earlier in 1873, there was an advert placed by a Swiss person who gave the Swiss Hotel as an address, and who was looking for a position as an indoor servant, and among their abilities were listed as being able to speak French, German and Italian, and a little English. The hotel seems to have been a place for those from Switzerland to stay.

The earliest reference to the Swiss Hotel I can find dates from 1871 when there is a record of the license being transferred from James Dennler to Rodolphe Stauffer.

The Survey of London volumes for Soho entry for the Swiss Hotel opens with “This was built in 1890 to the plans of the architects W. A. Williams and Hopton, who exhibited their design in that year at the Royal Academy.”

The Survey of London does not make any mention of the Swiss Hotel as being in Old Compton Street before 1890, however taking newspapers from the 1870s and 1880s, there are mentions of the Swiss Hotel, and 1890 could be a reference to the build of the current building on the site, rather than the institution of the Swiss Hotel.

The last reference to the name Swiss Hotel I could find is from 1969 when it was the site for a large gathering of West End members of the National Association of Theatrical and Kine Employees union.

By 1972 is was known as the Swiss Tavern, and was the home of the Playroom Theatre Club, which was advertised as “A new lunchtime company, has been formed by Jonathan Burn and Alan West at the Swiss Tavern, 53 Old Compton Street, W.1. The aim is to present original and experimental productions, for which applicants are welcomed whether engaged in the evenings or not. Workshop exercises with emphasis not only on the group but on individual expression will be part of the activities. A number of directors, writers, actors designers and technical personnel are already collaborating but a total number of from ten to fourteen is needed.”

One of the productions put on at the Playroom Theatre Club in 1973 attracted much publicity, including the following from the “Entertainment” section of the Marylebone Mercury (excuse the language):

“On the fringe of respectability – THEATRE on the cheap is alive and doing all right in the pubs of Soho. They call it fringe theatre and it certainly is in every way – on the borderline of respectability, like Soho itself, and of bankcrupty.

The Playroom Theatre Club, above the Swiss Tavern pub in Old Compton Street has been going a year almost with productions like ‘Areatha in the Ice Palace’ and ‘Wankers’.

The Swiss Tavern is opposite a sex-movie club, next door to a strip club. No wonder one of the biggest hits by Playroom was ‘Wankers’, which had to be retained for an extra week.

People who think ‘ pornography’ must be awfully disappointed, said producer Judith Wills from Missouri.”

Later in the article, the producers complained that “So far, despite pressure, the Arts Council has refused to help this sort of fringe theatre”, and that this refusal could have been due to being over a pub. There was a number of other fringe theatre groups operating in pubs across Soho.

The Playroom Theatre Group does not seem to have lasted beyond the end of 1973, however the Swiss Tavern continued to be one of the Soho pubs frequented by those in the acting profession.

The name Swiss Tavern disappeared in the 1980s, and by the end of the decade it was known as Compton’s, and in the 1990s, its current identity was well established, as this report from the Scotsman on the 13th of June 1996, illustrates:

“SORRY, but there only is one game in town – England v Scotland on Saturday. It is understood that much of London pubs, clubs and other places of entertainment, plans to close down in spite of Scottish fans having one of the best reputations in world football.

But at least one pub will be open. Compton’s in Old Compton Street run by Stevie and George from Glasgow, will welcome Scots. One thing to remember; it is reputed to be Soho’s best gay pub.”

The Golden Lion – Dean Street

The Survey of London records that the Golden Lion existed in 1728, so this is an old pub, although the building on the site today is a later version of the pub, having been built at the end of the 1920s for the brewer William Younger.

The current version of the Golden Lion does retain a number of features saved from the earlier building, including this rather impressive sun dial from the time before the rebuild when it was known as Ye Golden Lion:

The journalist, author, TV presenter, and Soho drinker, Daniel Farson wrote the book “Soho in the Fifties” about his time in Soho during the decade, the people he met, the pubs restaurants etc. The book contains many of Farson’s photos of life around Soho at the time, and it is a brilliant book for a snapshot of Soho, a Soho that for the most part, has been lost.

He wrote about the Golden lion under the title “The Queer Pubs”:

“In Soho there were two ‘queer pubs’ as they were called then, the Fitzroy off Charlotte Street to the north, and the Golden Lion in Dean Street to the south. Though the Lion was a few doors away from the French, the two pubs had so little in common that they might have been in separate towns. Married couples wandered into the Lion by mistake and left swiftly when they discovered they were surrounded by strange men, or remained, delighted by their chance discovery, but Gaston (at the French) did not encourage stragglers who crossed the frontier for a change of scene, and one of his quizzical stares sufficed to scare them off again. Only a few customers were regulars of both.”

The Golden Lion later achieved some notoriety as the serial killer Dennis Nilsen picked up at least one of his victims at the pub.

The Coach & Horses – Greek Street

On the sign on the corner of the pub, the Coach & Horses claims that it is “the West End’s best known pub”, and on the pub’s website, that “it’s a deeply loved London institution with a rich history”, but fails to put any of this history on the pub’s website.

The claims seem to stem from one man, Norman Balon, the Landlord for an incredible length of time from 1943 to 2006, when he lived up to his self proclaimed reputation as being the “rudest landlord in London”.

Typical of the many accounts of Norman Balon’s last day at the Coach and Horses is the following:

“The strangely coveted title of London’s Rudest Landlord is now vacant, as its long-time holder, Norman Balon of the Coach and Horses, Soho, tucks the sale price of the pub into his locally made suit and takes the Underground home to his home in Golders Green.

Mr. Balon, 79, has told more people to drink up and leave than Jeffrey Bernard drank large vodka-ice-and-sodas at his bar side during the decades he wrote Low Life, his celebrated Spectator column.

Last week the pub overflowed like a badly pulled pint with well-wishers. Richard Ingrams, founder of satirical magazine Private Eye made a two-sentence speech: ‘the only man grumpier than me. I salute you’.

Writer Beryl Bainbridge cheered, Spencer Bright, biographer of both Boy George and Norman Balon, looked sad.

For this is the pub behind Michael Heath’s extraordinary cartoon strip ‘The Regulars’ in Private Eye, which once had one Regular saying to another ‘I’m sorry I was rude last night. You see, I was sober’.

At the farewell bash, Heath remarked ‘I don’t remember Norman being rude. in fact, i don’t remember anything from those years’.

By classic Soho standards of stiletto rudeness, Norman Balon was a measured man. Tourists asking for sandwiches might, though, be puzzled to be told to leave and not come back. It was a defense mechanism against bores. The Coach, as everyone called it, was a pub for talking, since Mr. Balon would tolerate no jukebox, among other things.”

The Coach and Horses featured in the play, “Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell”, by Keith Waterhouse, which opened in London at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Lane in October 1989, with Peter O’Toole playing the lead character of Jeffrey Bernard, with a small supporting cast.

Jeffrey Bernard was a journalist who wrote for Private Eye and Sporting Life, and for the Spectator under the name of “Low Life”, where he wrote about his life in Soho and in the Coach and Horses where he was very much a regular.

The magazine Private Eye held their lunches at the pub for 25 years.

Norman Balon’s biography was ghost written by Spencer Bright and went by the title of “You’re Barred, You Bastards: The Memoirs of a Soho Publican”.

There is a conversation with Norman Balon here (again click here to go to the website if you cannot see the post):

There is a 1987 BBC Arena documentary about Jeffrey Bernard which includes film within the Coach & Horses:

And another documentary on Jeffrey Bernard – Reach for the Ground, which includes some film of Soho as it was:

The Coach and Horses is Grade II listed, both the pub building, and as part of a block of adjoinging buildings. It is listed for the exterior architecure and for surviving internal features.

The first record of a license for the Coach and Horses dates back to 1724. The current building dates from around 1840, and the pub was remodeled and extended in 1889, with the interior bar from 1930 when the pub was taken over by Taylor, Walker & Company.

It is a wonderful pub, and a reminder of a lost Soho.

The Three Greyhounds – Greek Street

The Three Greyhounds claims that the name comes from the greyhounds that roamed the area that became Soho, when it was open field.

The pub appears to date back to 1837, when Soho was a densely built and populated area of London, and greyhounds roaming the fields would have been a couple of centuries before. The mock Tudor styling of the pub probably intends to give its appearance some age.

I cannot find too much of a history to the Three Greyhounds, apart from it being a typical Soho pub which attracted its fair share of writers, musicians, those active in the theatre industry etc. All who were once part of the drinking culture of Soho.

The journalist, author, TV presenter, and Soho drinker, Daniel Farson quoted earlier in the section on the Golden Lion, included in his book a summary of “A Soho Type of Person” and which encapsulates how drinking was such an important part of the culture of Soho:

A Soho Type of Person:

The drinkers in the French symbolised Soho in 1951.

What makes a Soho type of person? You need a Bohemian streak to find the lure irresistible. You would never contemplate going out for ‘just the one’ unless it was the one day. Soho people rarely use ‘drink’ in the singular – lets meet for a drink, or we’ll discuss it over a drink – for they know that that much singularity is absurd. Yet they take offence if someone asks them if they want ‘another’ for the semblance of self-discipline is vital.

An alcoholic hates drink; the Soho person loves it. This is why there are so few alcoholics in Soho though plenty of drunks.

Soho people do not tell ‘jokes’ and avoid the eyes of those who do. They relish true stories, especially of their friends’ disasters. equally they enjoy celebrating a friend’s success….when the friend is paying. The good luck might rub off.

A Soho person is someone:

  • who is not afraid to cry in public;
  • who rarely travels by public transport, preferring the privacy of taxis;
  • who regards taxes of the other sort, and all brown envelopes with little windows, as an unwarrantable intrusion;
  • who cashes cheques anywhere, except the bank;
  • who seldom knows the date;
  • who will miss a dinner appointment if he is enjoying himself;
  • who has been barred from at least one pub, club or restaurant;
  • whose life staggers from the gutter to the Ritz and maybe back again.

Pubs have long been an important part of life in Soho, and is one of the reasons why so many pubs remain. I will continue exploring these wonderful institutions in part 3 of my tour of Soho pubs.

For more on the author Daniel Farson quoted in this post, see my post on The Waterman’s Arms – Isle of Dogs.

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Strand Lane, a Tragic Story and William Lilly

Tickets for my final Southbank walk until next summer: The South Bank – Marsh, Industry, Culture and the Festival of Britain, on the 20th of October, are now available by clicking here.

As well as finding the locations of my father’s photos, it is fascinating to see how London has changed compared to any old photo, and the three volume set of Wonderful London from the 1920s is a fantastic source to compare how London has changed in the past 100 years, and the following photo of Strand Lane from the book took me to a very old place with a long story:

The text from Wonderful London with the above photo reads: “Strand Lane is thought to have once been the bed of a stream which ran down from Drury Lane to the Thames. A bridge called Strand Bridge crossed it, and the name was afterwards transferred to the landing stage at the bottom. The entrance to the Roman Bath is just to the right of the passage under the old watch house, and the property belongs to the parish of St. Mary’s. Just below the point where the camera stood for this photograph are some steps on the right leading up to Surrey Street”.

There is some truth and also a big error in the above 1920s text, which I will come to later in the post.

The same view today (although not exactly from the right place as there was a van and a car parked to the right and behind where I was standing):

The photographer for Wonderful London walked through the passage under the house, and took another photo looking down Strand Lane:

So I did the same:

The Wonderful London text for the second photo reads: “A low entry opposite the church of St. Mary-le-Strand leads to this quant passage. In former times Strand Lane led down to Strand Bridge, a landing place for boats much used by the inmates of Strand Inn, which lay just to the west of the lane. In ‘The Spectator’ it is recorded that Addison landed with a ten sail of apricot boats at Strand bridge for somebody’s stall in Covent Garden. There used to be some tenements in the Lane called Golden Buildings, but at present the backs of high houses on the east and a brick wall on the west are all that keep it as a lane.”

The description of the lane in the last sentence of the above 1920s text can equally apply to much of the lane today, but where is Strand Lane?

I have marked the location of Strand Lane within the red oval in the following map  (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The entrance to Strand Lane is from the south, along Temple Place. The Strand Campus of King’s College London occupies the large area of land to the west, and also the buildings along the eastern side of the lane, so today, Strand Lane seems to be fully within the campus of King’s College London.

Today, the lane comes to a dead end at the north. The Wonderful London description states that entry to the lane from the north was through a “low entry opposite the church of St. Mary-le-Strand leads to this quant passage“, however this has been closed off for the last fifty years due to the expansion of the college buildings.

Rocque’s map of 1746 shows that Strand Lane was to be found in the mid 18th century, and also shows how the lane ran directly to the Strand, just opposite the eastern end of St. Mary-le-Strand. Strand Lane can be seen running down from the Strand, in the centre of the following extract from Rocque’s map:

In the above map, you can see that Strand Lane runs down to a set of stairs into the river which went by the name of Strand Bridge.

In an 18th century reproduction of an earlier map, we can see Strand Lane, with the name of Strand Bridge Lane on the left edge of the map, when it was along the western border of the old Arundel House, one of the large houses and grounds that once lined the area between the Strand and the river:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The above map shows 4 small boats at the end of Strand Bridge Lane, illustrating that this was a place where you could take a boat along the river for a fee.

The use of the word “Bridge”, either in the name of the lane, or for the landing place at the end of the lane can best be described by taking the following extract from “London Past and Present” by Henry B. Wheatley (1891) :

“Strand Lane, in the Strand, east of Somerset House, and opposite the east end of St. Mary’s Church, was originally the channel of the rivulet which crossed the great thoroughfare under Strand Bridge. It must be remembered that the Strand at this part has been raised fully 20 feet above the ancient level. The lane led to the landing place, at one time known as Strand Bridge; but this was destroyed in forming the Thames Embankment and the lane is no longer a thoroughfare.”

“London Past and Present” also includes a passage from the 1709 publication “History of the Quakers” to substantiate a claim that there were once 311 open channels of water crossing the roadway between Westminster Hall and the Royal Exchange:

“The 18th December 1656, J. Naylor suffered part; and after having stood full two hours with his head in the Pillory, was stripped and whipped at a cart’s tail, from Palace Yard to the Old Exchange, and received three hundred and ten stripes; and the executioner would have given him one more (as he confessed to the Sheriff), ‘there being three hundred and eleven kennels’, but his foot slipping, the stroke fell upon his own hand, which hurt him much.”

“Kennels” were streams of water that ran either along the middle or along the edges of a street. One place where Kennels can still be found is Wells in Somerset, where there are streams flowing in channels along the sides of the streets:

Whether there were 311 streams or channels of water leading down to the river, crossing the road between Westminster and the Royal Exchange in the heart of the City is impossible to confirm and it does seem like a very large number, however there must have been a significant amount of small streams, and Strand Lane appears to be the route of one of these old streams. A reminder of how much we have changed the land surface of the city over the centuries, with so many of the original natural features erased or buried.

The plan of Arundel House shows the street as Strand Bridge Street, and perhaps the stream of water also acted as the western border of the plot of land on which Arundel House was built.

This is the entrance to Strand Lane from Temple Place. the buildings of King’s College London line the two sides of the land, and there is an enclosed overhead walking route between the two sides:

Temple Place, and the Embankment which was behind me when I took the above photo, were built during the late 19th century, so originally, the Thames came up to the roadway in front of me, and this was where the stairs at the end of Strand Lane could be found.

I use old newspapers for research into the places I write about. You need to be careful about journalistic spin, and as ever, newspapers always focus on the bad aspects of life, however they do give a good impression of day to day life in a city such as London.

We also tend to romanticise the London of the past, however if you did not have money, London was often a dark and brutal place for the poor, and particularly for girls and women, and whilst researching Strand Lane, I came across one of the most appalling and sad stories that I have read. This was reported across several newspapers on the 16th of June, 1786:

“Saturday morning the body of a fine young woman was taken out of the Thames at the end of Strand Lane, where she had drowned herself the preceding night. She appeared to be about eighteen years of age, and was known to have been turned out of doors the day before, by one of those inhuman monsters, in the shape of women, who keep brothels in the neighbourhood of Drury Lane.

The poor young victim had been brought from her parents at the age of eleven years, by the mistress of the Bagnio, from which she was dismissed when her face grew common, and the charms of extreme youth and novelty were no longer a temptation to debauched constitutions, and debilitated age. Thus thrown upon the town, penniless, and heart-broken, she put an end to her existence. the body was taken to a house in Strand Lane.”

The article states “charms of extreme youth and novelty” when she should have been described as a child, and although from the article some of her history was known, the article does not even give her the dignity of a name.

One cannot begin to imagine how much she must have suffered by the time she ended her life at the end of Strand Lane, in the Thames at what is now Temple Place and the Embankment.

Looking up Strand Lane today, the white house from the Wonderful London photo towards the end of the lane, buildings of King’s College on either side, a mix of very different architecture, and overhead crossings:

View to the west of Strand Lane, with a large, brick building with what looks like an apse, the curved section at the end of the building, almost over hanging the lane:

There is an unusual feature on the very top of the building in the above photo, a dome to house an astronomical telescope:

I wonder how much of the night sky can be seen given the level of light pollution in central London?

Approaching the end of Strand Lane, the van, and a car behind it, was the reason that I could not get into the right position to take an identical photo to that in Wonderful London. Whilst I was there, the lane seemed to be used for deliveries to and from King’s College buildings:

To the right of the van in the above photo, you can see some white tiling on the wall. This is the entrance to Surrey Steps:

Surrey Steps connect Surrey Street with Strand Lane:

One of the buildings that runs between Surrey Street and Strand Lane forms an arch over Surrey Steps. The end is gated so there is no public access from Surrey Street through to Strand Lane:

Surrey Steps is shown, but not named, in Rocque’s 1746 map, and I have highlighted them within the orange oval in the following extract from the map (note that where the steps meet Strand Lane, there appears to be some shading which would be the steps leading down to the lane):

I have also highlighted another feature in the above map, one that cannot be found today having been built over by Kings College buildings. This was Naked Boy Court, and the court featured in the earliest newspaper reference I could find to Strand Lane, from the 9th of January, 1733:

“On Friday Night the House of Mrs. Smith, a noted Midwife in Naked-Boy-Court, near Strand-lane, was broke open and robbed of 19 Guineas, 24 Broad Pieces, and several suites of Wearing Apparel.”

There were a number of Naked Boy Courts and Alleys in 18th century London, and the name seems to have come from a sign of a “youthful Bacchus astride a barrel”.

Walking into Surrey Street and this is the opposite end of Surrey Steps and shows that they are closed and gated:

There is also a sign on the wall at top left stating: “The National Trust Roman Bath, Down Steps Turn Right”.

Not only are the directions impossible to follow, but if you did get through the gate and down the steps, you would not find a Roman Bath, but the remains of a cistern dating from 1612 and built to feed a fountain in the gardens of Somerset House.

Just to show that you cannot always believe what you read, even in old books that for the most part are authoritative and accurate, in the book “London Past and Present” which I have quoted earlier in the post, Henry B. Wheatley states that “on the east side of this lane is a genuine, ancient Roman bath which is well worth inspection”.

Wonderful London also mentioned the Roman bath in the description to the photo.

In researching my blog posts, I always try to use multiple sources, books, maps, academic journals etc. to ensure they are as accurate as possible.

The Roman Baths / 17th century cistern are inside the building shown in the following photo, within Strand Lane. They are owned by the National Trust, but to gain access you need to contact Westminster Council at least a week in advance.

At the northern end of Strand Lane, there is no further access. This is where the old lane turned to the left / west in the 1746 map, and the turn is still here, but abruptly ends at a metal gate and the King’s College buildings that were built over the rest of where Strand Lane ran up to the Strand:

The northern end of Strand Lane was blocked up in 1971, using an order under section 153 of the Town and Country Planning Act, 1962 entitled ‘The Stopping up of Highways (City of Westminster), No. 3 Order 1971, authorising the stopping up of a length of Strand Lane.”

Looking back down Strand Lane with the brick building and apse on the right:

The building on the right appears from a plan of the college to be the King’s Building, and this link appears to have a photo of a large ornate room at the header of the page, which includes an apse at the far end, so perhaps this is the interior of the building with the apse almost hanging over Strand Lane.

Another view of the building:

Looking up at how the apse is supported:

Another delivery van enters Strand Lane:

Walking up to the Strand, and there is no sign of where Strand Lane once entered the Strand. From aligning maps, it seems to have been in the section of the building between the first and second pillars from the right, in the bay to the left of the “Welcome to King’s” sign:

At the far end of the King’s College building is the old Strand / Aldwych Underground Station, and on the side is green plaque:

Telling that William Lilly, Master Astrologer lived in a house on the site:

William Lilly was born in the county of Leicester, and the Leicester Chronicle on the 25th of October 1930 provides a summary of his life under the perfect local paper headline of “Diseworth Man’s Lucky Prophecies”:

“Leicestershire has given birth to some famous men. One of these, undoubtedly, is William Lilly, who was the first man in England to produce a prophetic almanac. He was born in Diseworth in 1602 and went to Ashby Grammar School. At the age of eighteen he journeyed to London and entered ‘service’.

He was fortunate to find in the City, a prosperous Leicestershire man who wanted a servant. Lilly was engaged to do odd jobs, but as his master was illiterate, and found the Diseworth youth was good at figures he employed him to keep his accounts.

It seems to have been the policy of William Lilly, all his life, to look specially after William Lilly. He so wormed his way into his master’s favour that he was awarded a legacy of £20 a year when the old man died in 1627. That was not enough for him, so he wooed the young widow and persuaded her to marry him. Six years later she died, leaving him property worth £1,000.

That gave him a start. he was now a man of leisure, and devoted a good deal of time to the study of astrology – then a very popular science (!), for most people believed in the influence of the stars on public and private lives. At the age of 42 he brought out his almanac, signing himself Meilinus Anglicus, junr.”

William Lilly:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The article continues:

“His almanac succeeded so well, and served him as so good an advertisement, that he set up a sort of astrologer’s business, being prepared to read the future for all who were willing to pay him. It seems extraordinary to us of the twentieth century that the most distinguished people of Lilly’s time used to patronise him, anxious to hear what the stars had to say about coming events.

Cromwell himself is said to have consulted the Diseworth astrologer. In 1648, when the Roundheads were besieging Colchester, and were not getting on very well, Lilly was sent for. He prophesied an early surrender, and the parliamentary troops were so encouraged that they forced the city to fulfil the prophecy.

But while Lilly was taking money from the Parliamentarians he was also feathering his nest from Royalist sources. He was consulted as to how King Charles might escape from his captors, and actually prepared a scheme for enabling the unfortunate monarch to get free. It failed because Charles had not the courage to carry it through to the end.

When the Stuarts were restored, Lilly’s fame began to decline, but he had several strokes of luck in his almanac. One of the prophecies, for instance, was taken to have been a clear indication that he knew the Great Fire of London was to happen; another helped him to acquire the favour of the king of Sweden, who sent him a gold chain worth £50.

In his old age Lilly found it wise to retire and keep out of the public eye. He lived to pass his eightieth birthday. He was a shrewd old man, if often unscrupulous and once his shrewdness saved him. He had prophesized in his almanac for 1653 that the Parliament would not last long, and that the Commonwealth would soon come to an end. He was summonsed to appear before a Governmental committee to account for his publication, but, before he attended, he got his printers to let him have some copies from which the objectionable prophecies were omitted. He presented them and protested that the other copies were spurious, issued by his enemies – and thus saved his skin.”

William Lilly and one of his annual almanacs:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

William Lilly, an example of one of the problems of walking around London, there is always so much to find in any small area, as Lilly lived just to the north east of Strand Lane.

Strand Lane is a strange place. There are gates up against the wall at the entrance from Temple Place. I cannot remember if I have ever seen them closed. It is also not clear whether Strand Lane is really public space, or it is part of the King’s College campus, as buildings of the college line both sides of the lane.

The entry into Surrey Steps from Surrey Street is closed and locked, implying that this entrance to the lane is not public space.

In all the time I was looking around, and photographing the lane, there was no challenge, however the only other people in the lane were clearly those who had business with King’s College, and it is a dead end, so there is no destination to be reached by walking along the lane.

It is though, a fascinating place. Possibly the route of a very old “kennel” or stream that ran from north of the Strand, under Strand Bridge, down to the river. It was cut off from the Thames in the late 19th century when the Embankment was built, but for long was a landing place, a boundary between the river and land, and was once also the western boundary to Arundel House.

It was also the site of the tragic suicide of an eighteen year old girl, who must have suffered much in her short life in eighteenth century London.

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The Gates of Stationers’ Hall – Perhaps

Three of my father’s photos in today’s post, which goes by the title of “The Gates of Stationers’ Hall – Perhaps”.

The reason for “Perhaps” at the end of the title is that I am still not completely sure that I have found the right location, but, as I will explain in the post, I cannot find any other location for the photo.

Each of the three photos are looking through some ornate iron gates, or railings, with part of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background, with the twin towers on either side of the western entrance to the cathedral and the dome providing a clear landmark:

In the photo above, you can see a line of buildings leading to a gap towards the right of the photo where part of the western entrance to the cathedral can be seen.

In the photo below, you can now see the dome, again through ornate ironwork, with more of the row of buildings in front of the cathedral:

There is no glass in the windows of the building on the left, probably from wartime bomb damage. The buildings in the above photo were where the Paternoster Square development is today.

The following photo is very similar to the above photo, but is looking slightly to the right, with part of the western entrance visible:

The Guilds and Livery Companies of the City of London often had their halls set back from the street, with a small courtyard in front, and an alley leading to the street. The alley would have an ornate iron gate to secure access to the courtyard and hall.

One of these halls, Stationers’ Hall is just to the west of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and I checked the OS map published a couple of years after my father took the above photo, and the location of the hall, and view across to the cathedral does seem to correspond to the three photos (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

In the above map, I have underlined Stationers’ Hall with a red line. The square to the lower left of the hall is their garden, and to the lower right is a small courtyard with the double lines, possibly of a gate just to the left of the red arrow, and the lane Stationers Hall Court which could also have been the location of the gates.

The red arrow shows the rough direction of view for the photos.

It is across Ave Maria Lane, and some open space, as the area was bombed badly during the war. To the right of the open space, you can see a a couple of buildings to the right of London House Yard, and leading between the buildings is a small street, also with the name of London House Yard.

Below the red arrow is a line of buildings along Ludgate Hill, and between the two rows of buildings, where the arrow is pointing, there is a gap, and through this gap, the view of the western entrance to St. Paul’s Cathedral is visible, as can be seen in my father’s photos.

So, I am sure that my father was taking photos behind the gates of the entrance to Stationers’ Hall, the short double lines, or in Stationers Hall Lane, to the left of the start of the red arrow in the map. But I cannot be 100% certain.

The reason I cannot be certain is that I cannot find any photos of the gates to the hall to confirm.

The best photo I have been able to find is from the London Picture Archive, and which dates from 1920 and can be seen by clicking here.

In the photo, you can just see the inner gates, and these do not appear to have the ornate ironwork as in my father’s photos.

The outer gates, presumably the ornate iron work in my father’s photos, cannot be seen as they are wide open.

So again, the location looks exactly right, with the view across to the buildings opposite, including the slight offset to where London House Yard runs between the two buildings, and the view of the cathedral through the gap between buildings, all seeming to confirm.

But as I cannot find a photo of the gates, I will leave the word “Probably” in the title of the post.

Time to have a look at Stationers’ Hall, and the hall consists of buildings on two sides of a courtyard, in front, and to the right of the following photo:

The other side of the courtyard:

To learn about the Stationers’, I turned to the book “The Armorial Bearings of the Guilds of London” by John Bromley and published in 1960, which does seem to offer one of the more comprehensive overviews of the City’s guilds and companies.

In this book, the company has the name of “The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers”, which was the full name used from 1937 to recognise the amalgamation of the Stationers’ Company with the Company of Newspaper Makers.

Today, the Newspaper Makers wording has been dropped, and the company describes itself as “The City of London Livery Company for the Communications and Content Industries”, showing how these City institutions have continuously evolved as their trades have changed.

The word “stationer” comes from the Latin word stationarius – a stall holder as opposed to an itinerant seller of goods, and it seems that the important role of these “stationarii” in producing, lending and selling books in mediaeval universities started to limit the name to this specific trade, which also then included bookbinders, illuminators and text writers.

In 1403, Text Writers and Illuminators were united by civic ordinance into a single Guild, which is the direct ancestor of the Company of Stationers’.

On the 4th of May, 1557, the Stationers’ were incorporated by Royal Charter.

The Stationers’ have had a hall on the current site since 1606, following a move from their original, 1554 hall, a short distance away.

The hall has been rebuilt and been through a number of changes and modifications in the past 400 years. It was destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire and more recently suffered serious bomb damage in 1940, during the same raids that resulted in the cleared space seen in front of my father’s photos.

At the rear of the hall is a small garden, and a gate to the side of the hall provides access to Stationers’ Garden:

The following print from 1830 shows the entrance to the garden on the left, and the hall looking much the same as it does today:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

On the front of the hall is a memorial to liverymen of the company who lost their lives in the Great War, 1914 – 1918:

And a plaque that records one of the trades associated with the Stationers’, recording that Wynkyn de Worde set up his press in nearby Shoe Lane around the year 1500:

An ornate sign for Stationers’ Hall, with their coat of arms, hangs from the hall:

The arms of the Stationers’ Company include three clasped books, an eagle between two Tudor roses, and above a white bird, a representation of the holy spirit, and a white cloud radiating beams of light.

The arms are also displayed on wooden bollards around the courtyard:

The following view is looking from the courtyard towards St. Paul’s Cathedral. The building surrounding two sides of the courtyard, and blocking the view of the cathedral is the Club Quarters Hotel:

The walk way through the hotel, seen in the above photo, appears to be in the same location as the original exit from the courtyard to Ave Maria Lane. If I am right, it was in this walk way that my father took the photos looking through the old gates.

Walking through, and looking in the direction of the cathedral, the view is still blocked, now by the Paternoster Square development:

Looking back from Ave Maria Lane, with the entrance to the courtyard in front of Stations’ Hall, at ground level, and under the hotel. The gates in my father’s photos would have been somewhere around this entrance:

To get a view of the cathedral, I had to turn right and walk along Ave Maria Lane to Ludgate Hill, where, on the corner of the junction, I had the following view;

Compare the above view with my father’s photos, and imagine then walking to the left, back along Ave Maria Lane to where the entrance to Stationers’ Hall is located, and the alignment of the cathedral, the dome, two towers, is about right in the photos looking through the gate.

I cannot be completely certain, as I cannot find any photos of the gates with the hall behind, but the map, and the views across to the cathedral, including the gap between buildings, and the street layout, all look right.

So whilst I cannot guarantee, I can say that the gates were probably those at the entrance to Stationers’ Hall.

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